Biography & Class Description

Paloma McGregor is in her fourth season as a dancer with Urban Bush Women, with which she has been honored to perform around the world in such seminal works as the Bessie Award-winning Walking With Pearl: Southern Diaries, Batty Moves, Shelter and Les Escailles de la Memoire, which will have its NY premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Nov. 2008. She began her dance career with Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theatre and went on to earn her MFA in Contemporary Dance from Case Western Reserve University.

In addition to performing, Paloma is a choreographer and guest Artistic Director of Bronx-based INSPIRIT dance company. Her choreographic works have been presented at such venues as The Dance Place in Washington, D.C., Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, MOCA/Cleveland and Cleveland Public Theater. She is currently developing a new evening-length work, Blood Dazzler, in collaboration with director Patricia McGregor and poet Patricia Smith, which will premiere in 2009.

Paloma also teaches poetry, dance and community engagement in New York and around the country. This fall she will join the modern dance faculty of New York’s pioneering New Dance Group. With a BS in Journalism from Florida A&M University and a former career as a newspaper reporter and editor, she specializes in creative movement workshops that unearth individual voice and encourage community-building through writing and dance.

Modern

Paloma McGregor's rooted/reaching movement approach focuses on foundation-building (core strength, weight shifts, spirals, gesture and devouring space) as means to developing artistic freedom. Each class will be rooted in an overarching theme, such as inhabiting our internal and external terrains, moving beyond destinations and recognizing and interpreting subtlety and nuance. Through these practices, we will unearth our individual movement potentials. And we will have fun. The approach draws from such sources as Urban Bush Women teaching methodologies, Yoga, Graham, Christal Brown's Liquid Strength technique, Bartenieff fundamentals and Pilates. All you need to bring is an open mind, a sense of humor and a willingness to dig deep.