Alice Klugherz, Performance Artist
Alice Klugherz has been performing her docu/whimsy talk/dance work since 1988. In that same year she started teaching for Hospital Audiences. She taught movement/drama workshops for adults with mental illness and children with physical and or mental disabilities. In 1992 she started teaching Let’s Pretend, an amalgam of dance and drama for pre-school children at a Queens Y. She went on to teach a toddler-with-their-adult version of this class in both the New York and Queens Library system where she also taught mask and puppet making workshops. She has taught dance and drama in a middle school and worked as a teaching artist. She has studied dance technique, education and choreography, fine arts, theatre and writing for most of her life and has a BA in Healing Through the Performing Arts from Empire State College (2012). In the summer and fall of 2017 she taught pre-school drama at a private school in Brooklyn.
Her performance work has been part of PS 122’s Avant-Garde-Arama, Dance Theatre Workshop’s Fresh Tracks, Dixon Place and other NYC venues. Natural Selection, a full evening of works about being and becoming an older woman, was performed at University Settlement in May 2017 and was supported by an LMCC Creative Engagement Grant. She has also received an Independent Challenge Grant from The Field and a Public Imaginations Grant from Dance Theatre Workshop. Alice is a regular reader at the Cornelia St Café’s Monologues and Madness and has written theatre and dance reviews for Front Row Center.
TAP Work:
"Through TAP I had the opportunity to do a residency with Katie Rainey and T.Scott Lilly at PS 279 in the Bronx. Witnessing how the TAP pedagogy, and social justice philosophy is taught in the classroom was a great way to reinforce the TAP classes I had taken. The seminars were varied and well done. Each one was packed with vetted methods, information and questions for further inquiry. I was also a mentee with Lifetime Arts, inc under the direction of Annie Montgomery. I worked with master storyteller and teacher Robin Bady. If TAP has helped organize my brain (see this blog), Robin has helped me understand how to both structure and teach the elements of a story. Lastly I had a great time volunteering for CWP Teaching Artists on their residencies helping their students complete their stories and poems."
Most Memorable TAP Moment:
“While volunteering at PS 37 helping second and fifth graders finish their poems, I saw how a poem written creatively, without a focus on grammar or spelling, could help a student learn both. One of the children who seemed to struggle with reading her own work had a breakthrough as we took turns reading her poem out loud to each other. As we added and subtracted words until it sounded and looked finished to her satisfaction, I could see she understood more then when she first sat down. She “found” the poem as she heard her own voice and mine and looked at the typed words. Her own work had drawn her in. She enjoyed the beginnings of an examined life! This experience made everything that I had done at TAP fall into place.”
Find out more about Alice here:
Check out Alice's Lesson Plan she presented in her CWP residency.
Interested in TAP? Find out more about our 2018-19 Program.
See more of our 2017-18 Graduates in the 2018 TAP Anthology!