MSP 203: Wendy Rogers

Release Date: 6.25.26

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Among Company: Becoming a Dancer with Wendy Rogers

Episode 200: Show Notes.

What if dance isn’t just about movement, but also about the people who move with you through life? In this reflective episode, dancer, choreographer, and teacher Wendy Rogers joins the show to tell us all about her career and how collaboration guided her creative voice. Wendy’s story is deeply rooted in experimentation, resilience, and the profound kinship shared between dancers. Tuning in, you’ll hear about Wendy’s early life and the struggles that shaped her, her dance education and how those formative years defined her career, the different projects and collectives she was a part of, and the transformative experiences that she had through dance. We explore and honor the wisdom of older, more experienced dancers before discussing what it means to keep learning and evolving across decades of practice. Wendy speaks about a life-altering incident that changed her relationship to her body and helped her step into her identity as a dancer. Our guest even delves into the birth of the Wendy Roger’s Dance Company, the works she created, her years of teaching, and so much more! To hear all this and be reminded that relationships with other dancers is a gift, be sure to press play now!

Key Points From This Episode:

Welcoming Wendy Rogers to the show.
A brief overview of Wendy’s life and early struggles.
How Wendy got involved in dance with Ruth Hatfield.
Wendy tells us of her experience at Berkeley High School.
Studying dance education and what made her pivot away from that.
Creating the Moveable Feast and what that time was like for her.
How Margaret Jenkin’s piece, ‘Summerspace’ transformed Wendy.
Wendy tells us about her dance collective, Among Company.
What we can learn from older, more experienced dancers.
How her accident changed her life and made her call herself a dancer.
The Wendy Rogers Dance Company and the first dances she created.
Why Wendy believes that relationships with other dancers are a gift.
A brief overview of her time teaching and her ‘ten-year projects’.
What Wendy is up to now and what’s next for her.

I have choreographed and performed contemporary dances for over fifty years, residing in the East Bay Area, New York City and Riverside (University of California dance faculty, 1996-2016). I am grounded in the radical pedagogy of Ruth Hatfield begun in childhood, Berkeley, 1957. Movement exploration is primary. Years of study and/or performance with Modern/postmodern artists (e.g. David Wood, Margaret Jenkins, Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, Sara Rudner) led me to a neo-experimental approach, set and improvised work. I dance in dialogue with the work of others across decades, following composer Lou Harrison’s words: “Cherish, conserve, consider, create.” I also worked in projects produced by composers John Luther Adams and Paul Dresher; and in one instance on the moon of Endor, filmmaker George Lucas.

I am grateful for community learning in college dance programs: UC Berkeley (BA 1971) and Stanford (M.Ed. 1993). Since 1968, work as a college dance educator intertwined with my creative process, providing livelihood, context and a wealth of intergenerational relationships. Exposure and experience of 1970’s downtown dancing in New York City, notably dancing alongside Sara Rudner, expanded possibilities of both physicality and imagination. Returning to Berkely, CA, I formed The Wendy Rogers Dance Company (1977-90). Together with dancers, composers and artists, we made each dance its own world. In 1991 I transformed the Company into ten-year projects that intensify ongoing creative cycles with collaborators. In multi-year projects, dances focused by singular concepts evolve and morph into specific performances allied to occasion and place. The extended time frame allowed for in depth explorations of the perceptual, physical and poetic relationships we form with our surroundings, and each other. See What Happens (2011-?) rekindles past dancing from my Body of Work (1968-present) through ‘REPO’ – a process of recovering and exploring histories at play in dance making. Together with multi-generational collaborators, I repossess moving artifacts, while generating dances arising from the emerging present. We engage directly with the temporality of dance and a dancer’s body, raising questions of who dances how over time. The pandemic interrupted and suspended the project as I had initiated it. However, instead of ending, SWH has become an ongoing way to be, whether instigating activities or welcoming opportunities generated by others. I reinvent how to move in studio time with Sara Rudner and Risa Jaroslow, dance mates from NYC circa 1975, together again in the East Bay! I continue dance relations with Jennifer Jerum and John Diaz, dance mates from SoCal since 1997. And more. As our lives and bodies change, we destabilize ourselves to find different routes.

Over the years my work was supported by Fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; a 2009 Fulbright Visiting Scholar Award in Malaysia; and a University of California Dickson Emerita Professorship (2018-19). The support of fellow artists cannot be overstated: every dance foray fills me with gratitude for work made and life lived with extraordinary artists. This historic moment of sociopolitical catastrophe, changes everything. I remain confident in the relevance of dancing – everybody’s and my own.

Wendy Rogers, June 23, 2026