Terry Sendgraff

Terry Ann Sendgraff was born in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1933 and grew up partly in New Castle, Pennsylvania. She earned a recreation degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1955, then worked at the intersection of dance, physical education and women's gymnastics. Graduate study in dance at the University of Colorado Boulder and teaching at Arizona State University exposed her to the modern-dance lineages of Alwin Nikolais, José Limón, Charles Weidman and Merce Cunningham.

Sendgraff moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s, combining that technical background with improvisation and the regional counterculture. At Skylight Studio in Berkeley, which she cofounded with Ruth Zaporah, she explored a low-hung trapeze whose ropes met at a single suspension point. The apparatus could spin, twist and travel through circular as well as linear pathways, expanding the choreographic possibilities beyond a conventional parallel-rope trapeze.

She named her integrated practice Motivity. It joined heightened sensory attention, improvisation and emotional presence with rigorous aerial technique. Rather than treating the apparatus as a platform for discrete tricks, Sendgraff asked dancers to respond to its momentum, orientation and instability. The method became both a performance language and a pedagogy that encouraged each student to discover an individual movement voice.

Between 1974 and 2007 Sendgraff created more than 300 performances, from site-responsive outdoor events to proscenium works. She directed Fly By Nite (1978–1980), identified as the first women's trapeze-dancing troupe in the United States, and later the Motivity Company. Her experiments included multi-level trapezes, early dance use of bungee cords and long-form structures such as *A Year of Sundays*.

After a 1984 breast-cancer diagnosis, Sendgraff made illness and recovery part of her choreographic material. *Hovering* (1988) became one of her best-known solos and received an Isadora Duncan award for solo performance in 1989. At 57 she entered another vertical vocabulary—stilts—and created Women Walking Tall, a community performance project that operated from 1991 to 1995.

Sendgraff taught at the International Aerial Dance Festival in Boulder from 1999 through 2005 and received an Isadora Duncan Sustained Achievement Award in 2005. Her 2018 memoir, *Can You See Me Flying?*, recorded the history from a first-person perspective. She died at home in Oakland in 2019, leaving a lineage visible in artists and organizations including Frequent Flyers, AXIS Dance Company, Zaccho Dance Theatre, Project Bandaloop and many independent aerial practitioners.