Joan Skinner

Joan Skinner began studying dance at six with Cora Belle Hunter, a teacher connected to the body-education lineage of Mabel Elsworth Todd. That early encounter placed anatomical awareness and efficient coordination at the foundation of her dance education, though Skinner would later develop a practice with its own distinct use of guided imagery and improvisation.

After college training, Skinner entered the center of postwar American modern dance. She performed with Martha Graham's company and then with Merce Cunningham's company. Those experiences gave her direct knowledge of two consequential but very different modern-dance systems: Graham's dramatic, codified physical language and Cunningham's independent treatment of movement, music, and space.

A serious back injury changed the direction of Skinner's work. Seeking a way to dance without reproducing pain and excess effort, she studied the Alexander Technique and began practical experiments in 1963. Rather than organizing training around the imitation of exterior shapes, Skinner used poetic images, touch, sensory attention, and improvisational tasks to help dancers notice and release habitual tension. This inquiry became Skinner Releasing Technique.

Skinner taught at the University of Illinois before joining the University of Washington in 1967. At Washington she became a central figure in dance education, remaining on the faculty until 1989 and directing the Dance Division from 1985 to 1987. Dancers came from around the world to study with her and learn SRT. Her teaching linked individual somatic inquiry with compositional freedom rather than treating body awareness as a private therapeutic end.

Skinner Releasing Technique spread through intensive study and teacher transmission. The Skinner Releasing Network now represents a continuing community of certified teachers and maintains resources about the practice. Her work contributed to a broader late-twentieth-century shift toward training dancers from the inner body: sensation and coordination became sources of action, not merely corrections applied after movement had been made.

Skinner died on March 7, 2021, at ninety-seven. Her papers at the University of Washington document part of her choreographic and teaching life, while living teachers continue to transmit and refine the technique. That combination—an archival record and a practice that evolves through embodied teaching—is essential to understanding her legacy.