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This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with Rachel Feinerman, an amazing dancer, choreographer, and dance/Pilates instructor. I'm lucky to have taken class both beside her and from her many times over the past decade.
Rachel has been teaching dance in NYC for more than 20 years. She has performed for Laurie De Vito & Dancers since 1999, and also for Daria Fain, Ricardo Gomez Dance Theatre, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Wilson Mendieta, Sita Mani and many others.
She has done a variety of film, photo, and art projects including Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, and co-founded a performance workshop company for adult dance students. Certified in teaching the Simonson technique, an injury-preventative and scaffolded dance teaching methodology, Rachel also studied qi-gong and Pilates for many years before her love for anatomy and creative somatic work finally drew her to the Kane School in 2021, where she is honored to be part of the Kinected residency program.
Rachel has two sons, ages 13 and 10.
Here's Rachel's website. Here's her Instagram; you can also get a glimpse of her in action on Vimeo. (And, if you're in or near NYC, you can book a Pilates session with her HERE.)
Read on for Rachel's answers to my three questions!
1. How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker?
I describe myself, first and foremost, as a dancer. That title includes a lot of different types of work and exploration within it–teaching dance classes, performing with Laurie De Vito & Dancers for 20+ years and other choreographers throughout that time, choreographing pieces for individual productions, co-creating a performance workshop company for adult dancers, collaborating with visual artists, Pilates teaching, anatomy lectures… But it all comes back to my engaging with the world and making sense of the world through the lens of the body and movement as a language.
I feel that our bodies innately hold and transmit information about the world and ourselves, from the emotional to the mathematical to the environmental. Dance is the exploration of those concepts and the practice of a dancer is to refine our ability to express those ideas where, perhaps, words may not be sufficient. I continue to do what I do not just because of the love for movement and teaching, but also for the satisfaction and high I get when my brain kicks into this “next gear” engagement and thinking. It makes me feel alive and centered.
2. How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life?
Being a parent was a whole new world of emotions and actions and ideas! So, of course, I wanted to and had to explore that through dance. I have been lucky enough to teach pretty consistently throughout my pregnancies and throughout my kids’ lives. The benefits were both physical and creative.
Physically, my changing body provided plenty of insight into my teaching and understanding of everyone’s bodies. I gained greater awareness and capability in teaching different bodies at different stages of life. Continuing to teach and perform also kept me connected to my identity as an artist and dancer. I know many new parents can often experience a loss of identity, so I was very lucky to have been able to continue to work and even perform 9 months after having my first child. At the same time, it was also a struggle as I had to adapt my thinking about my strong and capable physical abilities to a new reality. That can be pretty emotionally-charged for dancers.
Creatively, I have benefited from having consistent weekly classes to teach because I got to, rather, I had to find the time to choreograph combinations for my classes. This allowed me to explore everything choreographically, and I have to say my students are awesome because they really came along on all the emotional and physical journeys that I was exploring. But that really is the point of dance–while the initial creative spark may come from something specific to my interest, as soon as it is part of the body, I feel it becomes universal.
3. What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days?
These days, I continue to connect to my creativity by taking weekly classes with my longtime teacher, mentor, and friend, Laurie De Vito. Every time I start her warm-up, I feel like I am returning to home base. I still teach and choreograph, but I recently decided to challenge myself and become certified to teach Pilates through the Kane School at Kinected. It is a wonderful Pilates studio with deep connections to the medical community, has an incredible staff, and a curriculum that is equally rigorous in its anatomy training and its somatic problem-solving creativity. I feel lucky to have been hired there. This summer I will also begin to give anatomy lectures to dancers, which is honestly a dream come true for me. While not easy to go back to school at my age, it was a challenge I really needed.
