MoxBlog

“What a week,” Deborah Riley says in a soothing voice to her dance students, about two dozen women and men, as they lie on their backs on the floor. A few are professional dancers; most are devoted amateurs. “Almost a hundred days of — ”

Wry chuckles escape from the federal workers and politically minded around her.

" — a lot," Riley finishes, with characteristic understatement. Tall, thin, with an airy bearing, she beams as she walks around this modern-dance class on a recent Saturday morning at Dance Place, in Northeast's Brookland.

“So let’s let go of that. Come into your inner architecture and your breathing. Feel the ease of your body,” Riley urges. “You’re coming home.”

A rustling sound rises from the corner, where percussionist Sam Turner is stirring chimes and a rattle made from goat hoofs. It’s improbably ethereal, the music, Riley’s voice, the mood. In this relaxed, recumbent atmosphere, preparing to dance looks more like meditation.

“This is my therapy,” Judy Lieberman, 57, says after the class. The acting special assistant at the Environmental Protection Agency has been taking Riley’s dance class for about 20 years. “It’s where I reboot,” she says.

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You wouldn't guess that Riley, 67, and Dance Place are undergoing the greatest upheaval of their existence. For the past 18 years, Riley has been co-director of the blackbox theater and studio space, with Carla Perlo, 65, who founded Dance Place in 1980. A year ago, both women announced that they will be stepping down on Aug. 31. In July, they expect to name the first new person to run the institution in 37 years.

Each director will be honored with a farewell performance. Riley's is first: "Celebrate Deborah," on April 29, will feature local dancers in Riley's choreography — including works she created for Deborah Riley Dance Projects, the company she led for 23 years — and guest artists such as Douglas Dunn, a former Merce Cunningham dancer in whose troupe Riley performed for nearly a decade in the late 1970s and '80s.

The gala send-offs (Perlo’s is on June 24) offer a chance to savor in an otherwise hectic season. The search for a new director, Perlo confides, “has been really stressful for everybody.” Preparing to hand over the dance haven that she built and that Riley has helped nurture in various roles, shifting responsibilities to the staff, planning next season without knowing who will oversee it: Complicated jobs have become even more so.

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But Riley, true to her nature, seems at peace with her upcoming departure from Dance Place.

“It’s been my family,” she acknowledges. But she won’t miss the constant worries that go along with managing morning-to-night classes for adults and children, after-school programs, summer camps, visiting artists and performances nearly every weekend — and always, always, the funding concerns. “It doesn’t stop,” she says.

Over tea at Busboys and Poets near her home in Silver Spring, Md., Riley reflects on the path that led her to Dance Place, and where she’ll go next. With her sleek blond bob, she looks elegant and chic, wearing a cream-colored sweater and a necklace of blue beads.

Raised in Cleveland, Riley grew up listening to her parents’ Broadway albums and making dances in front of a mirror. She took tap and ballet lessons, was a majorette in high school, and finally dove into dance with a passion at Ohio University. She abandoned plans to be a schoolteacher and joined the first graduating class of dance majors.

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After earning a master’s in dance, she landed in New York, and eventually toured with Dunn’s company. But as a somewhat shy Midwesterner, Riley often felt out of place in the competitive downtown-Manhattan dance scene, and when by chance she was invited to perform at Dance Place’s original location, in a cramped Adams Morgan walk-up, she decided to stay. She taught and created works on local dancers, and in 1986, when Perlo’s rent spiked and she moved Dance Place to its current address at 3225 8th St. NE, in a former welding workshop, Riley moved with her.

It felt like home, she says. A safe space to become a choreographer, a teacher, a leader: “My own personal growth has unfolded and unfolded.”

She founded her company, handled marketing and other jobs, and in 1999 Perlo made her co-director. Three years ago, Riley and Perlo oversaw a $4 million renovation of what had been a simple concrete bunker. They added a second floor with another dance studio and expanded their office space, installed showers and upholstered theater seats to replace the folding chairs, and built a park outside.

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Last year, Riley received the Pola Nirenska Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance, named for the highly respected Washington dance teacher and choreographer who died in 1992.

Riley says she’s cheered by the fact that more dancers have made their homes in the Washington area, and that new dance spaces are opening, such as Dance Loft on 14, on 14th Street NW. But she worries about the precarious funding situation for dance, and President Trump’s proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts.

“I can’t even say how dangerous that is,” she laments. Dance Place, which has a $1.8 million budget, receives $40,000 to $60,000 a year in NEA funding, she says.

Over the years, Riley has stood apart on the dance landscape for her reserve and her patience, her fine craftsmanship as an artist and her careful thinking as a director.

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"We're so different," Perlo says. "She likes a detailed plan. I do not. I just bulldoze ahead. But Deborah really helps me. I'll say, 'Let's do this,' and she'll say, 'Don't you want to think about this?' ... She causes me to slow down and think about it and strategize."

Keira Hart Mendoza, 36, says: “We artists can have big personalities, and she’s such a calm, grounded person.” As the artistic director of UpRooted Dance Company, based in Bethesda, Hart Mendoza has turned to Riley for guidance and mentoring for the past decade. “Because she’s so grounded, she can ask you those hard questions, like: ‘What do you want to get out of this career? What is success?’ She asks you to look within yourself.”

This summer, Riley will start teaching movement to actors in the Studio Theatre's Acting Conservatory, and also to seniors with dementia and other older adults through Arts for the Aging. Working with seniors is her passion, Riley says; she currently teaches a small group at Edgewood Commons apartments.

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“I can’t wait to jump into my next steps,” she says.

"I believe in the power of movement and dance as a transformative experience. I believe that so deeply," she adds with a hearty laugh. "I think it's my religion. It's profound, how movement affords an opportunity to explore oneself in so many ways, at a body level, at an emotional level. And everybody can have that experience. Even an elder in a chair, who's being expressive with her hands and eyes, expressing the rainfall." Riley strokes the air, her hands describing a downpour.

“You can have a little dance with your pinky finger,” she says with a bright smile, circling her little finger with delightful agility.

She takes a sip of tea. “We have so much up here that edits,” she says, tapping her forehead. “To take that leap of faith and just feel yourself moving in space — that’s beautiful to see.”

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You could say it’s the philosophy behind her teaching: be, feel, surprise yourself. Near the end of her Saturday morning class, Riley coaxes her students into freewheeling, improvisational duets as the drumbeats roll. “Allow something to happen that comes from listening to your partner,” she calls out to them. Two by two, the dancers sweep across the floor, now spinning away, now whirling back together. Their teacher tosses out another thought, another thread that makes up her gentle approach to dance, and to life.

“What happens,” Riley asks them, raising her hands and fluttering her fingers like fronds in a breeze, “if you allow the space for something to become?”

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