Curriculum

White Mountain Summer Dance Festival is three weeks of intensive dance training on the Sarah Lawrence College campus. Now celebrating its Thirtieth Anniversary, WMSDF is an exploration of movement and creativity for students, educators, and anyone looking to enrich and deepen their understanding of the moving body and the creative process.

Under Artistic Director Laura Glenn, WMSDF continues its internationally recognized innovative and comprehensive approach that combines specialized training, personal attention and hands-on instruction. Nine faculty members work together to present a cohesive curriculum with more than 12 hours of instruction daily. All classes are taught by gifted educators committed to ensuring participants find their maximum potential for dance and movement artistry. It is a program that supports breakthroughs in technique, creativity, and life. Enrollment is limited to 40 resident participants to ensure a four to one participant to faculty ratio.

About the Artistic Director and Founder

Laura Glenn has been a senior faculty member at the Juilliard School, her alma mater, for the past 20 years. She also directs and produces the Ted Hershey Dance and Music Marathon in Hartford, CT, now celebrating its 11th year. As director of her own dance company, Works/Laura Glenn Dance, she has created over 35 works and is recognized internationally as a performer, choreographer, and teacher. She has also taught at Marymount Manhattan and Teacher’s College, the Alvin Ailey School, Lincoln Center Institute and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, and is a Certified Movement Analyst. Over the last 20 years, she has received fellowships from the NEA, NY Foundation for the Arts, Roberts and Dance Magazine Foundations. Her performance experience includes touring extensively with teaching programs, her own solo program, as a soloist with the Limón Company (11 years) and staging Limón works in addition to the touring of her own company. As the Artistic Director of White Mountain Summer Dance Festival, Laura has seen it grow for 25 years.

About Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence is a coeducational liberal arts college, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as credit and non-credit programs for adults and high school students. The College is nationally renowned for its rigorous academic and creative standards, which are fostered by small seminar classes and individual student-faculty tutorials. The SLC campus occupies 41 wooded acres with outstanding library, performing arts, music, visual arts, science, computing, and sports facilities. Just 30 minutes from Midtown Manhattan by car or train, the College is also located near the beautiful Hudson Valley.

Sarah Lawrence views dance in its totality – body, mind, and spirit – a perspective reflected in conservatory level instruction. Students are exposed to vital aspects of the art as practitioners, creators, and observers. Director Sara Rudner infuses the dance program with integrated, innovative approaches to the creative process, following in the tradition of previous directors Viola Farber and Bessie Schönberg, for whom the preeminent New York Dance and Performance Awards are nicknamed the “Bessies.” Acclaimed dancers and choreographers Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, and John Jasperse, among others, studied at SLC.