Shirley Ubell - dance school founder - Great Starts: American Teacher Series

Dance Magazine, May, 1996 by Karyn D. Collins

Shirley Ubell knows from personal experience about the restorative powers of dance.

"Dancing changed my life," she said. "I was a very depressed young person before I started dancing. My mom was very worried. She thought if I could learn ballroom dance that I would get a boyfriend and that would solve all my problems."

Well, she didn't find the love of her life in the dance studio. But Ubell did discover a love for dance, particularly modern dance, that not only transformed her life but has helped her change the lives of others.

Ubell no longer teaches, although she continues to take technique classes three to five times each week, presents solo concerts in her New York loft, and oversees her fourteen-member staff.

The nonprofit studio she founded in 1962--Center for Modern Dance Education (CMDE) in Hackensack, New Jersey--continues to make a name for itself with its focus, not just on modern dance education for all ages, but for its dance classes for people who are physically and mentally impaired.

At one point during the 1970s, CMDE had 700 students taking classes at seven branches throughout northern New Jersey. Today the center has 250 students all studying at the Hackensack facility.

In addition to modern dance, CMDE offers classes in ballet, tap, and Middle Eastern dance. Students of all ages are encouraged to experiment with choreography. The school has a repertory company that performs throughout northern New Jersey.

Ubell has produced several students who became professional dancers, including Shirley Black-Brown, who performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Dian Dong, who now dances with Chen and Dancers in New York, and who also worked for about ten years with choreographer Anna Sokolow.

Said Dong of Ubell: "She was incredibly in tune with all of her students. She always instilled in us that we're all special and that we all have our unique gifts and ways to do things."

Dong studied with Ubell from age thirteen until she was graduated from high school and went to study at the Juilliard School in New York. The years with Ubell also brought opportunity to perform in the reconstruction of Doris Humphrey's Day on Earth.

"Shirley was chairman of the Dance Notation Bureau at that time and they strongly believed that unless you were able to preserve the dances they would never exist again," Dong said.

In addition to those accomplishments, Ubell's work with mentally and physically impaired children and outreach programs to nursing homes and shelters for the homeless and battered women has earned her accolades from those in the New York-New Jersey area.

Ironically, this unique feature of Ubell's center began by chance in the late 1950s when Ubell was teaching at her first studio, called The Studio, in Hackensack. A parent brought her Down's syndrome child to Ubell's school looking for an activity for the child.

"I just didn't say no. My feeling was dance is for everybody. You don't have to have a special body type. You don't have to have a high I.Q.," Ubell said. "In fact, I've found that all of my kids in special education classes are sometimes the most creative. And when they start moveing, taking class, they start to do better in school, too."

Like that first student who had Down's syndrome, many of the mentally and physically impaired students who study today at CMDE have been included into the center's regular dance classes.

"As soon as we can, we mainstream the kids. We have a girl with spine bifida. She can't walk but she's just incredible, and the other kids just accepted her automatically," Ubell said. "When a parent complains and says 'I don't want my kid in a special class,' I tell them it's not a special education class, it's a dance class.

"My feeling is if that's the attitude of a parent, then we don't need them in our school."

The center began offering classes for neurologically impaired children during the 1980s and began offering a special class for people confined to wheelchairs.

"They are dancing with their arms, their heads. They move their wheelchairs or their aides move their chairs and they are truly dancing." Ubell said. "Every time I get discouraged I think of them. It's mind-boggling, it really is."

Ubell's own introduction to dance didn't happen until she was eighteen and, as Ubell tells the story, her first dance lesson was almost her last.

"I just hated the idea of ballroom dancing. The first time the teacher--Maya Kyla--touched me I froze," Ubell recalled. "She asked me if I had ever tried modern dance and I told her I didn't know what that was. I grew up in Flushing, New York, and we were very poor. I had never been to the theater or anything.

"But when she had me lie down on the floor and try some exercises, it was a very mystical, spiritual experience. I really felt as if the hand of God had come and touched me. Something inside of me immediately opened up."

Within days of that initial experience with modern dance, Ubell was taking classes and reading books about modern dance every day while attending Hunter College, where she earned her bachelor's degree in psychology.