David without Grace.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a graceless choreographer. That’s because I’m Graceless. Grace was my Welsh Corgi, my kindred spirit, my fluffy joy, my friend. She was euthanized due to illness at the age of 13 this past July. In the wake of this I find myself inevitably heartbroken and, oddly, struggling to choreograph as I once did.

My partner and I live in a loft which is mostly a dance studio where I rehearse every day with my company. Grace was with the dancers and me almost daily for 13 years. This is basically the lifespan of my company to date. The Bang Group without Grace never occurred to me. It still doesn’t make sense.

Corgis are a herding breed. As such, Grace had much to offer a choreographer. Movement patterns aroused her, rhythm aroused her, partnering riveted her, asymmetry provoked her. She had the same fixations I had. Her insane devotion to rhythm echoed my own. When I made an intricate, rhythmic pattern Grace would plunge headlong into the fray of dancers and try to sort them, to bring them to order. Sometimes she seemed just to want to drink in the intoxicating beat. This was rather annoying to the dancers, though her intentions were benign, but it was very helpful to me. I came to rely on her responses. I’d lay something out in the space and look to her. Her eyes would roll in boredom. I’d change the tempo or dynamic or alter the intent. She’d lick her black lips and sink to the floor with a huff. I’d add smart dollops of rhythm and yank the pattern toward crookedness and she’d leap up, yelping and charging. I knew I’d hit on something good.

She was a glamorous, if stout, redhead with daintily doughty legs and a raunchy sense of humor. Churlish people might have called her squat. She was diffident with new people but came to love each of the dancers very much and in very distinct ways. She was a good judge of character. She would race to greet the entrance of each dancer into the studio like a determined little torch and then settle at my feet to evaluate what I made in rehearsal. She loved ritual and so do I.

Her judgment wasn’t perfect. She found all slow movement tedious and would slink over to the couch and nap with her face underneath a sofa cushion whenever I worked on something languid. She detested Tchaikovsky and would bark with fury every year when we would begin to rehearse my weird and funny version of the Nutcracker called Nut/Cracked. This was unfortunate as we have been doing Nut/Cracked for the last seven seasons running. This year we are doing it at Dance Theater Workshop as part of its Christmas Extravaganza in repertory with Doug Elkins’ Fraulein Maria. It’s the first time we’re rehearsing it without her and it’s eerily serene.

Grace gradually came to take roles in various of the dances we rehearsed often. She learned the music and memorized where we’d be so she could place herself in our path and roll over on her back at opportune (for her) moments. Every time we’d drop to the floor, she’d dart over and flop to her back with a moan. She’d even bark when she heard parts of the Nutcracker music on television if they were the sections she hated most—The March, The Russian dance, Mother Ginger, The Dance of the Reed Flutes—though no one was dancing in the studio. She was uncanny.

These shadow roles in my repertory are vivid to all of us who worked with Grace. While we dance these pieces now, we alone see her onstage alongside us in “her” roles. Will my work change without her? Was her sense of humor part of what made my work funny? Or was it the other way round? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, aside from the terrible void in our family life, I miss her contribution to my art. I often let other choreographers use my studio when I was gone so long as they knew and loved Grace. It seemed to make her happy to be around people making dance. She was a part of the creation of the works of Doug Elkins (Fraulein Maria), Amy Sue Rosen, Amber Sloan, Sara Hook, Catherine Tharin, Kathy Tufano and Rachel Lynch-John, Fiona Marcotty, Keely Garfield, Anna Sokolow Players Project, Aviva Geismar, Josh Bisset, Elizabeth Johnson, Erik Kaiel, Keith Michael (her other daddy) who rehearsed his own Nutcracker, Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose with her present. She taught us all something about spacing, immediacy, intimacy, timing and also how to savor the moment. It’s a glorious legacy and she is sorely missed.

David Parker founded The Bang Group in 1996, which was the year Grace was born. Since then it has toured widely through the United States, Canada and Europe and performed annually in New York City in seasons produced by Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, DanceNow/NYC and many others. Parker’s notorious, comic/subversive Nutcracker, entitled Nut/Cracked will return to Dance Theater Workshop for the third time this December where it will play in repertory with Doug Elkins’ Fraulein Maria. This is The Bang Group’s 7th full-evening program presented by Dance Theater Workshop which originally commissioned Nut/Cracked in 2004. Parker is also developing new work for a season at Symphony Space to be shared with Gina Gibney’s company and will be preparing a new cabaret show featuring himself and Jeff Kazin for his 11th season with Summer Stages Dance in Concord, Massachusetts. He favors long term relationships not only aesthetically and professionally, but personally.