In Memoriam: Claire Schmais, 1928–2015

Claire Schmais, an inspiring pioneer in dance/movement therapy (DMT) education, died on May 7, 2015 in New York, New York. Author of The Journey of a Dance Therapy Teacher: Capturing the Essence of Chace (2004), along with over 25 articles, many of them co-authored with prominent peers in the field, Dr. Schmais was a leading exponent of DMT groups and their healing processes. With both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from Hunter College, she went on to serve as a professor and coordinator of her alma mater’s DMT training program for two decades, beginning in 1971. She earned a doctorate in Dance Therapy from Union Graduate School in 1978. According to her close friend and collaborator, Elissa Q. White, who generously accepted the task of preparing the memorial tribute below, “Claire” was born on the lower east side of New York City in 1928, and spent almost all of her life in New York City—or in the upstate communities of Hastings-on-Hudson and Woodstock. The daughter of Liba and Charles Dukalsky, Russian Jews who had been born at the Rumanian border, and the sister of Rosaline Schwartz, Claire spoke Yiddish until she attended kindergarten. Growing up amidst the progressive ideas of the Jewish Left, while excelling at sports as well as dance, her strong social consciousness informed her commitment to community growth and healing through movement. Claire and her husband Aaron Schmais’ three children—Beth, Michael, and Libby—survive them.

Reflections from Elissa Q. White

In 1998, Claire Schmais delivered the annual Marian Chace Foundation lecture, and it was my distinguished honor as her colleague and friend to introduce her. “Try to imagine the world of dance therapy without Claire Schmais,” I said then: “It is almost incomprehensible” (White as quoted in Schmais, 1999, p. 5). Those words resonate in a new way today. Sadly, the time has come for us to advance our field without the direct benefit of Claire’s foresight, brilliance, and determination. Without her guiding presence, we rely from now on, instead, on the written word—her groundbreaking scholarship and other writings—along with the living testimonies of her peers and the many students she trained with such insight and devotion.

At the 22nd annual conference of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), Sharon Chaiklin, Beth Kalish, Claire Schmais, and I, presented papers addressing how our personal lives shaped our work as dance therapists (ADTA Monograph, 1987). Having had but a single conference call to set up a format, we had not disclosed to one another what we were going to say or do. As a result, we panelists listened to each other with particularly rapt attention. We had already been working together for 23 years while establishing the ADTA and we certainly knew something of each other’s personal backgrounds. It was, however, quite unusual for us to hear such candid personal reflections on our experiences and feelings.

Claire’s own words from that panel presentation painted such a vivid picture of her and the factors that motivated her actions that I choose to quote them extensively here. In a partnership with her that lasted more than half a century, I always trusted, respected, and looked to Claire for intellectual acumen and her extraordinary ability with words. Sharing her self-portrait seems most appropriate now. Indeed, revisiting Claire’s talk has been enlivening for me, as it has enabled me to hear Claire’s voice again, as she described herself so poignantly.

Claire’s talk illuminated her strength of character, determination, social commitment, vision, and force of personality. I have identified a context for what Claire said of herself in each of the selected excerpts below.

For many, many years Claire belonged to a dream interpretation group, which provided her important insights during difficult times and sustained her meaningfully after she retired from teaching. She cited one of her dreams as the “inspiration” behind her talk:

I dreamt that a salesclerk at Macy’s urged me to buy a gray flannel suit, but I insisted on an Irish tweed—and that is how I see myself—sturdy, rebellious, warm on the inside, and a bit rough on the outside. As an outgrowth of this dream, I decided to share with you some very personal stuff about how two strands of my past have intertwined. My active temperament and my activist role. (ADTA, 1987, p. 5)

Claire was forward thinking in seeking out different modalities for self-reflection. She applied a discovery made through hypnosis toward the examination of her history in dance:

My first memory … is wriggling free from my mother’s arms. It is no accident that struggle, movement, and freedom have been salient metaphors in my life. When I was eight years old I went to an afterschool dance class. There I discovered a place that was congruent with my nature. Instead of being admonished to sit still, I was encouraged to move, to dance out my fanciful dreams and my darkest fears. The teacher, Edith Siegel, was my first model of a free spirited woman and a political activist. We danced war, poverty, peace, and freedom … When those dance classes were over, I asked my parents to enroll me in a dancing school. They said, ‘No.’ I remember crying all day and into the night. They still said, ‘No.’ Not because they were mean spirited, but because they were poor. They wanted to see me get a job with security, minimally a pension. That day was a turning point when I realized that my parents could not meet my needs. In order to be myself I would have to forego parental approval. (ADTA, 1987, p. 5)

Claire’s’ poverty in early childhood and her later involvement in left-wing politics informed her views on DMT education. This was fully in evidence in a 1970 grant proposal¹ that Claire, Martha Davis and I wrote for a model masters dance therapy training program. Our model consisted of sequential coursework that integrated theory and practice. This first masters program in dance therapy, started in 1971, would become the prototype for graduate training programs around the globe (White & Schmais, 1974). We sought stipends then for internships for minority students since few people of color—and no men—were practicing at the time. Stipends, we understood, would help us recruit a more diverse pool of applicants. Fortunately, the grant was housed at Hunter College, a part of New York‘s City College system, where tuition then was relatively low. Claire was already on the faculty at Hunter, which was also her alma mater.

An accomplished athlete, Claire had met her husband on a handball court. She openly disclosed aspects of her temperament through what she had to say about how her athleticism had enabled her to learn to compete and advance her ideas:

I used my energy and I dispelled my anger on the playing fields of Crotona Park in the South Bronx. In the process of becoming Girls Bronx Handball Champ, I learned to compete, to hit out directly and to put my weight behind my thrust. In later years I never felt fulfilled playing tennis, where form predominates. I like battling directly with my hand. (ADTA, 1987, p. 6)

During the establishment of a DMT association and even after its formation, many battles ensued with Claire’s full force behind them. Plans had been made to hold the ADTA’s third annual conference, in 1968, in Chicago. Given the violent crackdown on protests at the Democratic presidential convention in Chicago that summer, Claire implored the ADTA board to relocate the conference in solidarity with the protestors. And so it was: The annual conference was held that year in Madison, Wisconsin, instead. The move came, in effect, as a testament to Claire’s social consciousness, along with her strong beliefs and perseverance.

Claire’s determination to begin dance classes follows:

Despite parental objections, when I was 15, I went to work in the Catskill Mountains as a waitress … I earned enough money to start taking dance classes and shortly thereafter started performing. As a teenager you could [have] put me in a Jules Pfeiffer cartoon entitled, ‘I danced for identity.’ I leaped in blue and white in an Israeli troop, I chassėed in yellow calico with the American Squares, I stamped in my embroidered blouse and red boots in the Russian Glinkas, and the rest of the time I emoted in my black leotard at the New Dance Group … As a young adult I danced to ‘save the world.’ I belonged to a radical group called ‘Folksay’ where we used dance, drama, song and puppetry for political purposes. I remember dancing on Lucky Corner to elect Vito Markantonio, a progressive congressman, and in Madison Square Garden to save the Rosenbergs. [Unfortunately, Claire did not live long enough to learn of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother’s late-in-life confession of having lied on the stand in the trial that had sent his sister to her early death]. We created programs of peace and brotherhood to the songs of Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson… As a young married woman in the 60’s, despite not having succumbed to my parent’s pattern for my life, I did succumb to society’s view of domesticity, and dutifully followed my husband when he went to work in Washington, D.C. I left behind my new and exciting involvement in body work, choreography, and dance therapy. This was a low point in my life. In Washington, as a young mother of three, I danced to save my life, to deliver me from the diaper pail. I also began teaching reading skills through dance in the slums of Washington [See Schmais, 1966]. I taught poise and grace … through dance in a posh private school. At about this time I started considering a career. I was in a panic about what to do for the rest of my life. After much soul searching I decided on dance therapy. I no longer believed I could save the world, but maybe I could reach out to a few people and help them to sense their competence, enjoy their bodies, discover their identity and find a sense of belonging through a shared experience. I reaffirmed my commitment [by] interning with Marian Chace and working with people like Sharon [Chaiklin] in Washington. (ADTA, 1987, p. 6)

Claire both interned with Marian Chace at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, and joined in Chace’s 3-week workshop at Turtle Bay Music School in New York City, in l961. In that course with her were Beth Kalish, Deborah Thomas, and Arlynne Stark. During the workshop, Chace described two types of patients—manic and depressed—and asked that each participant pick a type and move as she thought that person would move. Claire chose to evoke mania. She knew herself well, and this choice was indicative of her intense energy level:

As a young dance therapist it is no accident that I was happiest working with young children, acting-out adolescents, bizarre schizophrenics, and rambunctious elderly. Depressed patients gave me a backache. (ADTA, 1987, p. 6)

In l967, she continued,

[W]e returned to New York, [and] I taught volleyball and modern dance at Hunter College and worked part time at Bronx State Hospital with Elissa. A few years later after giving a number of workshops [We led 11 one-week “Introduction to Dance Therapy Using Effort-Shape Movement Analysis” workshops.], Elissa and I, along with Martha Davis, pioneered the first graduate degree program in dance therapy [as referenced above]. The central focus of my teaching was, and is, that to use yourself as a therapist you must be fully known to yourself [See Schmais & White, 1969]. Fortunately, and sometimes painfully, I realized that to teach that concept I had to model it just as I am trying to do today. (ADTA, 1987, p. 6)

Claire explained in her talk that her “personal style and professional life intersected” (ADTA, 1987, p. 6) in her leadership role in the ADTA. In 1965, she chaired and organized the first annual meeting and conference of ADTA and did so again in l970. It is clear that she was a catalyst, and her list of “firsts” is quite long. She shared background on the ADTA’s origins:

Back in the sixties, I pushed for an association of dance therapists. Given my political experience, I knew the power of an organized group. When I first raised the issue, Marian Chace would not hear of it and I was summarily dismissed. I continued to prod [See Schmais & White, 1996]. In l965, when the time was ripe the idea took hold. (ADTA, 1987, p. 7)

In that year Claire was chosen to be the chair of a steering committee to form a dance therapy association—an idea that had been discussed during the previous year. Her foresight and perseverance helped determine a course of action.

Once the ADTA was incorporated, Claire was elected the first Chair of the Education Committee, a role she filled with true prescience. In 1968, she organized a 1-day conference on dance therapy’s research potential with Bonnie Bird, a Past Chairman of CORD, the Committee on Research in Dance (Bird, 1970). Held on November 10, at New York City’s Postgraduate Center for Mental Health under the auspices of its Director and Associate Director of Research, this was the first event ever organized around research on dance therapy. Among the speakers and presenters representing DMT were Sharon Chaiklin and Mary Whitehouse who presented their work on film. Among other luminaries present from various disciplines were: Valerie Bettis and Rod Rodgers, as well as Irmgard Bartenieff, Martha Davis, Judith Lynne Hanna, Judith Kestenberg, and Alan Lomax.

In the early 1970s Claire was a member of the first committee to formulate a DMT Code of Ethics. She also became the first chair of the Approval Committee whose initial task was to write the guidelines for approving graduate programs. Once Hunter College’s DMT program came into existence, a number of other graduate programs followed. Claire noted:

In the early seventies I raised the unpopular notion of approval for graduate programs. This was met with outrage and resistance. It took about five years to become accepted. In my next foray I urged that we adopt a single title for the graduate degree. I thought it should be an MS in Dance Therapy; Beth [Kalish] thought it should be in Movement Therapy. This time I lost the battle but won the war. The directors of graduate programs, after such sturm und drang, agreed to one title, ‘Dance/Movement Therapy.’ And thus we have a professional identity in academe. (ADTA, 1987, p. 7)

Claire’s commitment to education and to students of DMT resulted in so many consequential endeavors. Her publications on group process and development (Schmais 1981, 1998) and healing processes in dance therapy (Schmais, 1985; Schmais & Diaz-Salazar, 1998; Schmais & Felber, 1977) are seminal examples of theoretical considerations. Her writing talents also equipped her well to serve twice as co-editor of this journal, which she further served as a member of its editorial board for many years.

It may be a testament to Claire’s remarkably full life and countless achievements that I have written this much without yet mentioning her extraordinary devotion to her many students. Claire’s teaching was an art which was constantly and creatively changing depending on who was in her class (Schmais, 2004). Her concern, caring, and attention to each and every one of her students was a lesson witnessed by all of us who had the opportunity to work alongside her. What she hoped to instill in each of us was to be true to ourselves. Claire’s example was such a strong guide that it could not be more apt that to draw on her own words, in closing:

Maturity, I believe is coming to terms with who you are and acting in the world in a way that is congruent with your inner most self. I am grateful to this profession, wherein I could be myself and I thank each of my colleagues … who at times encouraged me and at times tempered my enthusiasm. Promoting unpopular issues does not win friends, but it does influence people over time and that makes me happy. I must admit that on occasion I have envied the mediators and arbitrators. For about five minutes I once even considered becoming [ADTA] president. But whenever I have tried those roles, I [would] feel de-energized and disempowered. I have enjoyed life the most when … looking ahead, confronting authority and fighting for my beliefs. (ADTA, 1987, p. 7)