Mura Dehn was a fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her work in 1995, few knew who she was. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list as long as my leg of things that I was going to do. Mura had died in 1987; she would be over 120 yrs. old so most of her colleagues and compatriots are gone. While waiting for the contract and trying to figure out if I wanted this project, I received a call from a gentleman named Allen Blitz who said, ‘I just saw your interview on the Jazz Dance channel, and I want you to know I was Mura Dehn's company manager, and I knew her for the rest of her life’. I thought, well, the universe is trying to tell me that this needs to be written. 

I had been a jazz dancer growing up. My first teacher was a vaudeville hoofer. I did not have much technical dance training but she bore an incredible amount of passion. She wasn’t doing the steps; she wasn’t just teaching “shuffle off to Buffalo.” She was tap. She was jazz. She inhabited it. She embodied the whole idea. And I was completely captivated by the rhythm. Anything jazz was so compelling. I started with her when I was six and began student teaching with her when I was thirteen. At that time there were many variety shows on television with jazz and tap dancing. This was long before a wide use of video recording so we just had our eyes and ears. It was wonderful to be able to learn from them and take it all in; anything we saw on TV we used, we would come in the next day and repeat and recreate it.

Later in college in California I became a modern dancer, studied ballet, but jazz was always my first love. One of my classmates, Lorraine Person-Kriegel was teaching jazz at UCLA while I was there pursuing a master’s in dance education. She had been engaged to Harry James, the great orchestra player, and a dancer and choreographer at the Paradis Latin in Paris. She was a jazz master, one of Luigi’s students and later his biographer. She mentored me. I took her position when she moved back to New York. Later she asked me to co-author a couple of chapters of a book she was writing on jazz dance. She wrote all the history chapters, which still stand today and I wrote a couple on jazz dance classes. It was a very concise book meant as a text for a community college course.

I became a professional dancer—a modern dancer—first on the West Coast then on East Coast. I danced with many groups in many venues, was an adjunct at several colleges teaching mostly modern dance and composition. I also was teaching ballet at a conservatory. Finally I decided to pursue a doctorate at Temple University. Their Dance program was serious, dense, amazing and had some of the finest African American dance scholars in the world—Brenda Dixon Gottschild, and Kariamu Welsh Asante. I realized how little I actually knew about Black social and jazz dance and didn’t say a word for about the first six months. Then I really started investigating the jazz form. It was a thrill to be there. At the same time, it was very, very humbling.

When I found Dehn’s work in ’97, I was doing an annotated bibliography on jazz dance. The New York Public Library had only a handful of items about jazz that weren’t written by Mura Dehn. Most items were very colloquial and topographical. But Mura scrutinized the rhythms. What happened when dancers responded to them, what the dancers’ energy and responses were a result of, the meaning of movement  and how it changed over time. Her work was at times romantic and metaphorical but also completely different and more in depth than anyone else’s. During those years of research, I fell in love with Mura Dehn but it was a hard sell. This was a time when African American studies were reclaiming voice and narratives. It was a struggle to put my work forward, but I appreciated the stringency and the sieve I was put through to acknowledge my own lexicon and the gaps in my foundational knowledge. What I learned changed the trajectory of my life, my dancing, and my teaching.