I remember the first time I did this lift... It was even money whether I was going to start giggling uncontrollably or pass out from sheer terror. You ride up on a wave of pure force that feels like a mountain rising underneath you.    The only thing that anchors you is the feel of your partner's hand in the small of your back. You arch up, and all you see is a vast upside-down space. Somebody yells at you to reach for the ceiling with one leg, and the floor (or your partner's chest) with the other. You have no idea where your feet are, but they're probably pointed, if only out of habit. Amazingly, it feels exactly the way it looks.

 Dancers, because their physical bodies are the instruments of their expression, are an ideal subject for sculpture. Dance is not something that dancers do; dancers are the dance. In the twenty years or so that I spent teaching and choreographing dancers, I found them endlessly fascinating -- their physical beauty, their enormous strength, their heart-breakingly difficult careers, all touched me deeply and daily. I began these sculptures in order to explore visually what I had experienced as a dancer and as a teacher:

the visceral sensation of dance movement,

the freedom that comes as a result of great discipline,

and the poignancy of lives laid on the altar of Art.