Debra McCall

Debra McCall is Associate Director of the Ross Institute Academy and  former Dean of Cultural History and Director for Curriculum at Ross  School, East Hampton, NY where she also taught World Dance, Choreography  and directed Senior Projects. A Certified Movement Analyst, she is a  Senior Research Associate at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement  Studies, NYC and an Honorary Board Member for Art Therapy Italiana,  Bologna, Italy. McCall has served on the graduate faculties of New York  University, Adelphi University, Prescott College and Pratt Institute  where she was also a Mellon Lecturer.  She has been awarded National  Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and New  York State Council on the Arts fellowships in choreography, dance-film,  and historical research. Her reconstructions of the 1920s Bauhaus Dances  of Oskar Schlemmer, produced by The Kitchen, Goethe House New York, and  the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, toured the US, Europe and Japan to  sold out venues including the first international Biennale de la Danse  in Lyon, France. With Robert Leacock, she directed a film of her  reconstructions of the Bauhaus Dances, which was selected for the  American Dance Festival’s first annual International Festival of Film  and Video Dance. The Labanotation of the reconstructions, and the film,  reside in the Library of Congress and in the Jerome Robbins Dance  Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at  Lincoln Center. McCall’s writing on the subject is included in the  International Encyclopedia of Dance, Oxford Press, and in the catalogue  for the international exhibition, Oskar Schlemmer. As a Rome Prize  Fellow in Advanced Design at the American Academy in Rome, she  researched ancient mystery rites to choreograph “Psyche’s Last Labor.”  Her “Body of Myth” workshops on archetypal movement led to  collaborations with the analyst/author James Hillman and the poet Robert  Bly. McCall’s kinesthetic lessons on Roman architecture were included  in the Smithsonian Institution/Annenberg documentary “The Mind’s  Intelligences” with Howard Gardner. McCall studied dance with Jerome  Robbins, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Hanya Holm, Consuelo Atlas,  Finis Jhung, Zena Rommet, Anna Halprin, Kei Takei, members of the Grand  Union and Natural History of the American Dancer, The Performance Group  (Wooster Group) and Richard Schechner, amongst others. She has also  studied a variety of world dance styles–with the Whirling Dervishes in  Konya, Turkey to Bharat Natyam with Indrani Rahman, West African dance  and drumming with Oko Ardyfio from Ghana, Butoh with Eiko and Komo, hula  on the island of Hawaii and Middle Eastern dance. She has served on the  Educational Committee of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. 

Source: Biennale de la danse