Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

It's interesting. I'm not a person who has come to pass in reaction to her family, in fighting against it. My family has been absolutely supportive of me and was not surprised that I ended up an artist, and happy about that. My parents would travel with an entire party to wherever I was performing. It was amazing.

When I look at my mother's family, it was clearly a matriarchy. My grandparents were from Russia, so my parents are first generation Canadian. I'm a first generation American. My parents decided not only to educate themselves but they ended up as raging liberal, engaged human beings. They made choices that are astonishing to me.

My father was the first person in his family to go to college. I don't know how my parents started out conservative and ended up profoundly sophisticated. I don't know how they did it, unless it was an act of will. And whatever that will was, I learned from it. I was taught by both of them that you should ask questions, you should have opinions, you should have your own mind. That's how you should go out into the world.

Of course, it got a little touchy when I'd have my own opinions and my father would say, "No, no, no." And I'd say, "I just did exactly what you've taught me to do." He'd say, "I must have failed to communicate." I would say, "No, you communicated exactly right. I just came to a different conclusion."

My parents didn't differentiate between me and my brothers. I'm the oldest. I have two brothers. We all read the same books. We all had the same toys to play with. My father was a scientist, and I had chemistry sets and I was blowing up things in my bedroom. I remember being surprised at some point that people differentiated girls' toys from boys' toys. They were just toys. They were books. Nothing was ever hidden from me.

We had everything in our house. I remember, I went through our library and found Lady Chatterley's Lover. I was in sixth grade. I noticed that my mother wouldn't take it away; nor did she say, "You can't read this." It would just reappear on a different shelf. She was trying to figure out how to pace me and make me wait, but without saying, "No, don't read this." I had to become an adult before I could fully appreciate the "good old boys" network: the kind of differentiation that other people were trained to understand.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

For me, feminism was and is a statement of a sense of oneself, how to view oneself as an equal sentient being in the world. When people say that being a feminist is passe, or they're not interested, I think they don't understand what the concept of the word is. It is about how you view yourself, how you wish to be dealt with in the world, and how you wish to deal with others.

And I ascribe to the school of feminism that suggests that in the process of becoming a feminist, you lift up other people with you. And that means men. It's a process of engagement and conversation. It comes again back to my parents. I have a sense of how women should be in the world and I don't differentiate by gender if I can help it, if I am aware of it. I think that culturally we are programmed in certain ways that we cannot avoid, and that we owe it to ourselves and to other people to try and be as aware as possible about our biases and our assumptions.

I remember, at one point, having a birthday and all of a sudden these time bombs were going off that I didn't even know had been planted, about what I thought success was, and how come I didn't have 2.3 children, and why didn't I own a house. Stuff that had never crossed my mind as essential to the person that I was. And I thought, "Where did this come from?" Now I try to be very attentive to what my assumptions are in any situation, to try to hear if there's an echo coming from someplace else. To try to notice if I say something that has a bias in it that I have missed. That's why I do the work that I do. That's what Passing has made me more sensitive to how I view other people, and how they view me.

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

When it comes to talking to young dancers, I don't set out to have conversations about these things. I wait for people to ask questions. Basically our conversations revolve primarily around how work gets made, how you view what you do, what its importance is to you, and what you feel that you can commit yourself to.

I feel like my generation was the Woodstock/Hippie generation. We were really clear about pursuing what we loved. I look at my younger brother who is 10 years younger than I am. His interest in finances was much stronger than mine was. He really wanted to be able to pay for and do the things he wanted to do. He wanted to make sure he had the money. This was astonishing to me though. It never even dawned on me that I was choosing a career that I wouldn't earn a living in. Now, that's probably part of the problem with the educational process: when you start school, they should say, "the economics of this are..." You should learn grant writing when you're learning how to pirouette. You should be taught some kind of art/business model.

My contribution in this area is to keep the studio going, charge very low rent for people to use it, and try to make it available for performances. I'm slowly but surely upgrading it. It has lights, it has a dimmer board. The next big purchase will be a sound system, and then this will become a full theater. I can give people a place to perform but they're drying up like crazy. So, I'm doing my best to keep this studio going.

How do you define success for yourself? How would you define success for the next generation?

When one has been in any business for any length of time, there are cycles at any given moment. When I first started out, my goal was to have peer recognition, and I got that. One of the things that I want most in the world at this particular point in time, is to earn enough income to pay my dancers so that they don't have to do 27,000 other jobs to be able to make work. I want to be able to acknowledge what they give to art and to the world.

I have a big age range in my company. I want to keep the older dancers going longer because they bring a kind of a maturity that I value beyond everything. They're smart people and it shows when they're working. The young performers that work with them learn exponentially from the experience and become much better performers. So at this time, that would be my own measure of success: to not have the issue of money hanging as a sword of Damocles over my head all the time.

In the larger world, the truism, "Just do the work" is the core of it for me: making the work. I love making these pieces. It gives me happiness on such a satisfying level. There's nothing that I know as well, that just fills so much: the response that we get when people see the shows. So, no matter what else is going on, I feel that it always come back to "Just do the work." And I don't do mainstream work. I went back to my high school reunion a long time ago and they said, "So, what do you do?" And I said, "Well, I'm a choreographer." And they said, "Oh, like Cats?" And I said, "No." And I realized the conversation was over. There was no way I was going to walk them from ballet to Merce Cunningham to Laurie Anderson. I'm out here, over on the edge, doing trapezes and talking and full-on dancing.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

Actually, I started out in modern poetry. My background was in English, and then poetry. I was more interested in language and thought I would become a professor. That's where I started. Then I went to a small liberal arts college and one of the students' wives started teaching dance class, and that was it. I didn't really start dancing until I was in college. I was a late bloomer in the dance world, but once I started, I just fell in love, and that was my new career.

It was very helpful because I felt that in my 20s, that was the time when people were trying to figure out what they were going to do. I feel that I had this gift, of this career, that I knew I wanted to do. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, after I was becoming a dance technician, and that's what you learned first, I realized I wasn't completely satisfied. I wanted the richness of language somehow in there. So I started writing and putting stories in. I ended up working with theater people, directors, doing choreography in theater, working with opera singers, teaching them about movement, coaching actors about ways of generating text and movement together, and then doing that with dancers. So I ended up with this amalgam, which is what I do now.

I think that describing my career cyclically is probably more appropriate. There are moments when I was doing solo performance, writing my own material, working with theatrical directors and composers and making solo shows. And then after that, I would do a solo show. I would decide that I couldn't stand to come in this room by myself another second, so I would get a group of people together, and then we would work on a show and that would go in a particular direction. I did a show called Rashomon, which was based on the film by Akira Kurosawa and the stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I was very interested in the cycles of truth, where you are standing. Everything I've ever done is from this point of view: Where are you standing to have this opinion that you have?

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

I think that if you look around, you can't help but be influenced by what you see. I grew up in a family where my mother decided at some point, as she was hearing about feminism, to become a feminist, to consciously become one. This meant that she went back to work. Even though she and my father intellectually talked it through, the transition for my mother going back to work was very hard for my father. He felt that there was a whole set of male things that he was supposed to be doing, that it somehow meant that he wasn't taking care of his end of it. They worked through all of those things, but the discussions were amazing to me, especially in retrospect, that they actually talked this stuff out. This is what we did at dinner, talked about all this stuff. I'm sure there were many conversations privately that we didn't get to hear, but basically the intellectual ones were held in front of us.

In terms of motherhood, I made a choice not to have kids because I knew that given the financial state that I was in, I couldn't support a kid. I didn't have enough money. I was with a mate at that time who had requirements for what it meant to have a child. I would have to go to work. We would have had to move out of the city, et cetera. I had talked to a lot of my friends who had kids, and they said, "He's wrong. You have to be true to yourself to have a kid." Since that was the person I was with, we weren't going to have a kid together. By the time we split up, I really had to consider whether I was going to adopt a kid by myself. I certainly know women who have gotten pregnant, and I decided not to. I have had the luxury of a family that I love. So, it's not like I was fighting against that.

I was kind of surprised that I didn't end up having a kid, but there were moments, as the cycles, again, go by, where you say, boy, this is the hardest decision I have ever had to make because it's so final at some point. A man can choose all the way through his life. If he wants to have a kid when he's 80 and he's still capable, he can have a kid. Women, it comes in the mid-40s some place, and there's just a cut-off date. So, I think it's an incredibly difficult decision. And I think for dancers, it's really loaded. Right about the time you're in your prime dancing, there's a slippery slope: you're smart enough to be a great performer, but just when you're getting there, your technique is starting to erode. When your technique is really hot and you're young, you're not as smart on stage; you don't have enough wisdom. So, there's a very short window. Then again, there are miracles like Margot Fonteyn, suddenly blooming again in her forties.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

There are so many women that really interest me: Golda Meir, Eleanor Roosevelt. I like reading about women who I've never heard of before, who have done extraordinary things that haven't been listed in the history books. Those are the women I'm really interested in because, man, they had guts and I'd like to have more books about them.

Currently, I think Laurie Anderson is an interesting woman. I would be interested in having dinner with her. Laurie Anderson basically started out doing performance art. She started manipulating sound, manipulating visuals.

When the Eva Sisters and I got together, we met in graduate school, Fern Friedman, Teri Hanlon, and myself, we started making odd pieces that we traveled around with. And for me, I think that forever changed my perspective on how one makes work. In graduate school, the goal was to work collaboratively and that influenced how I have worked forever. I'm always looking to other people I admire and how they work, trying to learn either directly from them, as in the case with Margaret Jenkins, or from work I admire, like Laurie Anderson's.