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Carol Walker: Ambassador for Dance
By Rachel Straus
 Changing dance education—and lives—at Purchase College and
beyond
If she hadn’t fallen
madly in love with dance in high school, Carol Walker says she
might have followed a career in international relations. But
as a performer, teacher, and choreographer for 27 years, and
then a college dance dean with connections to companies and
schools worldwide for the next 23, her life’s trajectory
shares the same variety and scope as that of a career
diplomat’s. Walker’s tenacity, negotiating skills, and
charisma are those of a first-rate ambassador whose success
involves focusing on the big picture. “I love dance because
it’s about music and people,” she says. “I loving seeing all
the elements come together.”
Walker’s wardrobe is colorful and she laughs a lot. Her words,
however, never mince. “I’ve been so bloody lucky,” she
says about being on a first-name basis with Mark Morris and
Merce Cunningham and about coming of age during the U.S. dance
boom. “I had wonderful mentors. I was in places where I could
grow and go.” Walker grew up in Highland Park, IL, the only
child of Madeline and Charles Kluss. Belonging to the
third wave of American modern dancers that developed—many
outside of big cities—Walker and her peers followed in the
wake of groundbreakers like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and
Hanya Holm.
Though Holm provide her with her “first taste of
professionalism,” says Walker, referring to the two summers
she spent studying with the German expressionist at Colorado
College, it was the lesser-known dance artist Phyllis Sabold
who introduced Walker to dance. Sabold gave the teenager the
first of many classes, opening her to the art’s innumerable
expressive possibilities. When Sabold developed cancer,
Walker—age 20 and recently married to Peter Walker—began
filling in for her mentor at her studio in Highland Park, IL.
“I remember Phyllis saying, ‘You can’t consider yourself a
good teacher until you can teach 5-year-olds and until you can
build a technique in someone,’ ” says Walker. Consequently the
budding young teacher taught all age groups while dancing for
Sabold and in summer tent show performances of The King and
I and Brigadoon. She also raised, with Peter, two
daughters, Kim and Kathleen. Then, after the death of Sabold
and with the prompting of a “lady of the community,” Carol
Eisenschiml, Walker opened her own studio in 1971. “I learned
a lot by doing and by seeing what the results were,” says
Walker of her development as a teacher. The results of merging
elements of Graham, Humphrey, and ballet techniques were good:
Her studio became a financial and artistic success; her
students went on to professional dance careers.
“I felt like Carol could run the world,” says dancer Janie
Brendel, who started studying with Walker in grade school and
whom New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning
described as “claim[ing] the stage with formidable delicacy”
in 2000.
Another former Walker student, Liz Frankel, a ballet teacher
at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, says, “Carol created a
magnificent freedom in her studio.” That freedom included
improvisational studies as a finale to technique class,
something rarely done even today.
In 1969 Walker had inherited Sabold’s teaching job at Barat
College, where no dance department existed. Seizing on a rare
opportunity, Walker slowly cajoled and convinced wary college
administrators to fund a new program devoted to dance
education, performance, and choreography. By the time she left
her position at Barat in 1984, she had become the
director of the theater and dance department. She had also
earned a BA from the college.
“There was always something perking me along,” says Walker,
“keeping my perspective fresh.” In the beginning it was
performing, but as her teaching responsibilities grew and
keeping in shape became more difficult, her focus changed.
First she choreographed for Barat Repertory Dance Group and
presented lecture-demonstrations with her studio dancers at
public schools. Then she went to New York City to study with
Alwin Nikolais, Cunningham, and Graham. She also received
National Endowment for the Arts grants to bring modern dance
companies and master teachers to Barat and her studio. With
increased government funding for the arts, Walker didn’t just
ride the dance boom, she grabbed its opportunities with both
fists.
This dance dynamo describes teaching 18 classes, raising a
family, choreographing, and developing and running a college
dance program without self-congratulatory fanfare. “Because of
the position of modern dance at the time,” she says, “you had
to be a leader. You rose to the occasion.” By 1983 Walker, age
46, could have begun resting on her laurels. Instead she took
up another challenge, applying twice to become dean of dance
at Purchase College, State University of New York. In her
second try for the position, Walker wrote in a cover letter,
“I do not have an internationally marketable reputation. I do
know something about dance administration. You may want to
keep reading.” Painfully aware that in the dance department’s
12-year history 8 deans (all former performing stars) had come
and gone, the search committee read on and, in 1984, hired
Walker. The newly appointed dean closed her studio and
embarked on the next phase of her career.
Being the ninth dean of the Conservatory of Dance ushered in
high-stake challenges and possibilities of professional
prominence. “Change never freaks me out,” Walker says.
But a less stalwart person would have trembled upon arriving
at Purchase. Some dance faculty members, who came from
pinnacles of the dance world, doubted her abilities. Rather
than keep her head down, Walker instituted weekly faculty
meetings that focused on students’ needs. She reached out to
incoming freshman with a semester-long seminar devoted to
teaching them about the prestigious faculty they were learning
from (and to let them know they could always come to her
office.) Then three years into her deanship, Walker took a
student group to Hong Kong’s international dance festival. As
the sole U.S. representative, the Purchase Dance Corps
impressed, and it soon embarked on 11 more international
touring opportunities for the faculty and students.
Walker’s determination to put Purchase College on the
international dance map continued. She developed exchange
programs with dance schools abroad; now there are five. She
fund-raised for tours and scholarships and for the
reconstruction and presentation of works by Bill T. Jones,
Paul Taylor, and George Balanchine, along with those of
emerging, cutting-edge choreographers. Young dancers from all
over the world began coming to Purchase for their dance
education. In 1998 Walker created a MFA program with faculty
member Kazuko Hirabayashi. Walker became dean of the School of
the Arts, a new position responsible for overseeing all art
departments, and won handfuls of awards from the dance
community, the college, and New York State.
“One of the things I am most proud of is how the faculty works
as a team,” said Walker when she retired as dance dean last
summer. For a diplomat like her, that remark sends the right
message: She acknowledges those who she works with
immediately. Her habit of putting others forward is not lost
on those around her. “Carol is a mother first,” says professor
Larry Clark, who was given his first teaching opportunity at
Walker’s studio. “She was like a fertilizer for a lot of us.”
Although Walker stopped teaching dance technique when she
became dean, her interest in students remained passionate and
strategic. Atlanta Ballet dancer Peng-Yu Chen remembers how
Walker traveled to Philadelphia to see her perform with her
Taiwanese high school. Walker personally handed Chen her visa
papers so that she could matriculate at Purchase. “She
believed in me from day one,” says Chen, who continues to seek
Walker’s advice.
Mexican-born choreographer Ofelia Loret de Mola will never
forget Walker’s commitment to help her at Purchase. When de
Mola could no longer afford tuition, she says, “Carol got on
the phone, made three phone calls and told me I was staying.”
For Jonathan Riedel, a former Limón dancer and a Purchase
graduate who is now artistic director of the fledging Riedel
Dance Theater, Walker is a role model for networking in the
arts and business world. “Watching Carol work,” says Riedel,
“is almost overwhelming.”
At age 70, Walker’s verve and chutzpah continues to move her
life forward full throttle. Since retiring as dance dean she
has traveled to Singapore and Taiwan to address dance
organizations and to Australia to judge a dance competition.
And Purchase’s president, Thomas J. Schwarz, who did not want
to see Walker leave, says that he and the new dean have roles
in mind for Walker in the future, besides her post as
co-chair of Friends of Dance, the supporting organization of
the Conservatory of Dance.
“It’s a wonderful life,” says Walker about her myriad
connections to the dance world. At dance performances at The
Joyce Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and City Center, she
is flooded with familiar faces in the audience, onstage, and
in the wings. She underlines the fact that her life couldn’t
have happened as it did without her husband’s support. When
Peter proposed, he promised his future mother-in-law that he
would “never take dance away from Carol.” Peter, who is the
dance department’s director of operations kept his word
and then some. His 50-year-long backing of his wife is
remarkable.
“I lived in an era when women were not trained for or
considered to have careers,” says Walker. “We were supposed to
be housewives. I’m so lucky because my husband and my parents
were very cool about me working.” Walker’s encouragement from
her loved ones allowed her to develop from a “jock” dancing in
gym shorts to a dance professional, addressing an
international consortium on its pedagogical future. Walker
isn’t only a groundbreaker for women who are determined to
have both family and meaningful work; she is a model for
anyone interested in becoming a leader in her field. Her
combination of stamina, savvy, and confidence makes her
uniquely powerful. Otherwise she couldn’t have, as she says,
“made my own resume.”
Walker began her life journey as a dance-struck teen who
discovered music and movement. Today she is a terpsichorean
diplomat, working in all walks of the dancing life.
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