Alice Bloch

Alice Bloch has a doctorate in dance history from Temple University with a dissertation on Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky and the cultural construction of the body, and a choreographic MA from UCLA. She is a 4th generation Isadora Duncan dancer, training with Lori Belilove, Gemze DeLappe, Ellen Foreman, Julia Levien, Andrea Seidell, and Linda Tarnay.

Alice presented The Dance of the Future: Roots and Radicalism” for the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation’s 2009 Advanced Summer Intensive and 2012 Isadora Duncan Birthday Celebration. She performed Isadora Duncan: Life into Art, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Isadora Duncan and the Dance of Democracy, for NDEO, Swarthmore College, and the first Isadora Duncan International Symposium. She offered Dancing the Supermom at Bryn Mawr and the University of Delaware. Her article, Duncan Lives! appeared in the September, 2008 issue of Dance Magazine. “Apollo/Dionysus: and/or?” analyzing Dionysian elements in Duncan and Nijinsky, was published in DANCE: Current Selected Research, Volume Six. She has taught Duncan dance at Temple University, Swarthmore College, Washington University, and the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and set Duncan dances on MADCO, St Louis, and the Happendance Company, Michigan. At the 2008 Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival, Ireland, she presented a comparison of the philosophies of Duncan and Hopkins. The workshop “Developing Collaborative Dialogue In and Across Disciplines,” with Mary Jean Cowell, used their expertise in the foundational techniques of Isadora Duncan and Michio Ito as a methodological model at the NDEO 2014 national conference. At the second IDIS in June, 2015, she presented Teaching Duncan Dance as Somatic Practice, and moderated the panel, Understanding Duncan’s Choreography as the Wellspring of Her Technique In July, 2015, she performed Isadora Duncan, Modern Dance, and Modern Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

A Center of Creative Arts (COCA) arts integration specialist, Alice uses dance to teach peace, math, science, and literacy. Her professional development workshops include How to Dance a Painting, at Michigan State University and the St Louis Art Museum, and Dancing Peace at the Missouri Art Teachers 2013 conference. She serves on the boards of the Missouri Dance Organization and the Missouri Alliance for Arts in Education.

Independent productions of her own and Duncan’s choreography include Dance: Self and Spirit, (2009), DanceLife: Celebrating 50 Years of Dancing, (2014), and Together Again, (2015). With and Always Arriving: The Journey Continues, performed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Washington University, the Veterans for Peace National Conference, 2007, Central Reform Congregation, and Kirkwood Presbyterian Church.

Alice, a Regional Arts Commission Artists Fellow, is the lead dance writer and editor for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Culture (Facts on File; forthcoming). Her article, “The Way of Dance,” appeared in Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women. She led workshops on Body Image, Healing, and Multi-Cultural Dance, at the Westminster College 2009 Symposium for World Health, and Healing and the Sensuous Body, combining Duncan dance and dance/movement therapy at the NDEO conference in 2006. Alice teaches creative dance to seniors and leads the movement in the Art and Alzheimer’s program at the Kemper Museum, Washington University. In 1991 she founded the Dance Program at Lindenwood University where she taught until 2006.