Linda Kent
Modern dance teacher

Linda Kent was born in Buffalo and earned a bachelor's degree in dance from Juilliard in 1968. A principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1968 to 1974 and the Paul Taylor Dance Company from 1975 to 1989, she has restaged Taylor's works for many companies-including at Juilliard, where she has been teaching since 1984.

Linda Kent with her husband Nick Lyndon and son Rory Lyndon

What's the most satisfying aspect of teaching for you?
There's that eureka! moment when someone you've been working with "gets it" and you see the light go on.

And the most frustrating?
When you've presented something as clearly as you can, and people just aren't ready to absorb it, for whatever reason.

When did you first know you wanted to be a dancer/choreographer?
By age 8, I was saying I wanted to be in a modern dance company, but I had no clue what that meant. My mother had a book about Jacob's Pillow, and here were these people all dancing around outside, and it looked really neat. In high school, it seemed clear that there wasn't anything else I wanted to do more.

Is there a performance you've attended that changed the way you think about dance?
When I was 15 or so, I got a scholarship to Jacob's Pillow. Both Donald McKayle and Alvin Ailey still had their companies and came to perform, and those were my eureka! moments. God! The depth of feeling, the anguish and the joy! What spoke to me were the stories-these people and their relations to each other.

What's the most embarrassing moment you've had as a performer?
We were filming Paul Taylor's Rite of Spring for television at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina in the early 1980s. It was very warm and humid, and as I ran onstage, I saw this huge puddle of sweat just before I ran through it. I slipped and went down… I popped right back up and continued. I wasn't hurt. But when they edited the tape from those two evenings, they chose that part where I fell down! It was sort of blurred on camera and wasn't so visible-but you hear this loud boom! They left that in! Now, when I'm showing the tape whenever I'm staging the piece-we've used it at Juilliard, and when they're restaging it at Taylor-they'll just replay it over and over: "Look at Linda!" Boom! "Look at Linda!" Boom!

What is your proudest accomplishment in life?
My son. That was a part of my life I didn't want to miss. Dance was my calling, my passion… but creating a child and raising it is an amazing and humanizing experience. You watch the brain develop and the connections get made, and you wonder what's going to come out of their mouths next!

What "words of wisdom" can you offer young people entering the field today?
Don't forget how big the field is-and how small. It's important to find out what you don't know, and not to write off something and say "I'm not interested in that" or "I'll never need to know that, or want to do that." Be a giant sponge and just absorb everything, not just dance.

Next Month: Gordon Gottlieb, percussion faculty member