A Dancer With a Difference

This morning while I was looking through my sources for interesting bits of information I came across an article in the NY Times about 31-year-old actor, Gregg Mozgala who has recently added dance to his repertoire. I know, it’s a common occurrence for actors to take up dance but this is a bit different—Gregg has cerebral palsy. His condition has made walking difficult and as he put it, caused him to look like a “human velocirapter,” as he tried to maintain his balance. All of that changed when choreographer Tamar Rogoff decided she wanted to work with Mozgala. Ms. Rogoff has a lot of experience working with people outside of the normal parameters of the dance world so she approached Gregg to see if he would be willing to train with her. Surprisingly he agreed so, along with twice weekly private sessions, Gregg attends an experiential anatomy class as they embark on a year of change that they coined “The Experiment”

In my search on the internet for more information about Gregg Mozgala and Tamar Rogoff, I found their blog site and spent a good part of the morning reading Gregg’s posts about the process he's going through. What I found really interesting were the parallels in Gregg’s training to the Feldenkrais® approach of Awareness Through Movement®. The body scans and the somatic experiences that Gregg describes could have been written by a Feldenkrais student.

I've included a video clip that features an interview with Gregg and Tamar and shows Gregg dancing the Diagnosis of a Faun.