WHAT FRANCES ALENIKOFF ISN'T TELLING - Movement Research

delivering, to great effect, her signature flash—an unabashed shoulder-high thrust
kick.
We were collaborating on a duet, www.alenikoffking.com, that we
previewed the following month at Movement Research's Monday Night series at
Judson Church, and premiered a few weeks after that at Dance Theater
Workshop's 30 th Anniversary Founder's Celebration. Both organizations grew out
of the expansive 1960s ferment, a time of boundary-crossing and merging of arts
forms. Mixed-means was on the cusp of becoming multimedia, and dance and
theater suddenly seemed inseparable, the watershed decade before performance
art.
DTW was founded by Jeff Duncan, and at his last birthday party, in 1988,
Frances was irresistibly riveting seated on a sofa flanked by its two other cofounders,
choreographers Jack Moore and Art Bauman. A connection was made
between us and we’ve been fast friends ever since.
Frances’ past is legendary and details spill out around the edges of our
rehearsals, talks, and phone marathons. Like many artists, she had a difficult
childhood, with a demanding father and an enviably beautiful fashion model
mother who appeared in movies, then later taught yoga, moved to California,
became a spiritualist, and knew Aldous Huxley.
During the 1940s, Frances began studying Afro-Haitian dance on
scholarship at the Katherine Dunham School with celebrated dancers such as
Syvilla Fort (an amazing woman, also one of my first teachers, for whom John
Cage wrote the first piece for prepared piano).