For Sharon Kinney, being part of the first 10-week fellowship program offered by the National Dance/Media Project is a dream come true. She is one of two MFA candidates selected to spend Winter Quarter participating in intensive workshops on dance documentation.

Exhilarated by the opportunity to meet long-time heroes in the dance community - "Last week, I met Michael Kidd," she says, "I saw every movie he ever made" - she has also been inspired by the film and video presentations of the seven other project participants, including six accomplished professionals from the dance field.

At mid-life, Sharon comes to UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures with a strong history of achievements combining the academic and performance worlds. She started dance training at the age of 5, earned her bachelor's degree in dance in what was then a new program at Ohio State University, and danced with New York companies such as the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Twyla Tharp and Dancers, and Dan Wagoner Dancers.

She has produced and presented her own solo and group works, and she was choreographer for Robert Altman's film, Popeye. From 1982 until 1997, she was part of the team that built a new dance curriculum at Virginia Commonwealth University, safe in a comfortable and challenging tenured academic post. But she found herself counseling students to explore all their possibilities and began to wonder, "Why am I not doing that?"

In a chance encounter on a trip to New York, Sharon got reacquainted with Victoria Marks of UCLA's dance faculty, and before long, Sharon's application for graduate studies was in the mail. She began her studies last fall.

Judy Mitoma, her adviser and mentor on the faculty, believes that Sharon's return to graduate studies makes "a tremendous statement about the possibilities of people developing new career tracks throughout their life," as Sharon moved from dance performance and academic life to the new media world.

The Dance/Media Project involves three kinds of works. In the first, the camera stands outside the proscenium arch of the traditional stage, filming exactly and only what a typical audience member would see. In the second, multiple cameras are used to intercut the performance with close shots of the dancers that might not be visible even from the best seats in the house. Finally, the stage is dispensed with altogether. A "dance for the camera is a work of art that exists on its own as a video or a film and probably has never lived on stage," Sharon says.

All of these possibilities intrigue her. She plans to take two dancers on location around UCLA and Los Angeles to create short dance pieces that evolve from the setting. And she is also drawn to the editing possibilities of dance documentation, "bringing the audience and the dancer together" with perspectives and views not available in traditional performance. The big thing right now is that I'm learning," Sharon says. "I'm seeing what's out there, how I can really define my direction."

Whatever professional goals she decides to pursue, Sharon will almost certainly stay in Los Angeles where her children live. Her older son is a UCLA graduate who majored in English and now writes for the screen, and her younger son is an actor. Although she left dancing briefly when her boys were infants and toddlers, she was part of "a new wave of women who continued their dance careers after motherhood."

Sharon's first big break as a dancer came when Paul Taylor selected her and a fellow Ohio State student to participate in a campus performance. In the staging, the dancers emerged from boxes - except for Sharon and her buddy, whose roles were "essentially to stand still for 50 minutes." Nevertheless, she did it so well, that a year later, Taylor offered her a spot in his troupe. Sharon's most recent performance was in a site-specific piece staged by Marks at the new Getty Museum.

Although the drive to perform is less encompassing than it was when she was a younger dancer, she hasn't lost a bit of her passion for dance. "I count my blessings all the time," she says, "because I'm doing what I love to do."

That enthusiasm is contagious, Mitoma says. "I feel Sharon's energy as a more mature student is of tremendous value to our other graduate and undergraduate students. Her impact is beautiful."

Published in Winter 1998, Graduate Quarterly