About Nancy

Written by Hetty King, an excerpt from
“A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice: The Anatomy of Center”
available from University Press of Florida

Nancy Topf was a dancer, choreographer, teacher and movement pioneer. She was married to her long time collaborator, musician and composer Jon Gibson, with whom she had one son, Jeremy Gibson. In 1998, she died when the plane she was aboard SWISS AIR flight 111 bound for Switzerland crashed into the ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. No one survived this tragic accident. Nancy had been on her way to teach a workshop in Geneva. At the time of her death, she was 55 years old and deeply engaged in the process of codifying and branding her life’s work - Topf Technique/Dynamic Anatomy. 

Nancy had completed the first draft of a book detailing her technique and was working to create the structure that would enable her to offer a recognized certification program in her work. She was active as a teacher both in NYC and abroad, and offered both private sessions and extended workshops and retreats. She had established a summer retreat in Rockland, Massachusetts, at Ina Gardner’s studio and camp, where students from around the world gathered to spend two to three weeks immersed in her technique and improvisational structures and performances.

Nancy received her formative dance training from Merce Cunningham and also studied dance with Robert Joffery, Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton and at the H.B. Studio. She wrote and reviewed dance publications for Dance Magazine, the New York Times and the Village Voice. Most importantly and most relevant to this text, Nancy was an innovator in her field as she developed and codified her own technique “Topf Technique – the Anatomy of Center.” 

Early Years

As a dancer, Nancy came of age in the early sixties, a time of idealism and liberation. “By the fifties, modern dance had built conventions as elaborate as those of ballet.”  (Jowitt, Deborah, Time and the Dancing Body, University of California Press, 1988 9 P. 310-311) ) Dancers emerging from these conventions seized upon this pervasive idea of freedom, not as themes for their work, but in the constructing of a new lexicon that required the dancer’s body itself to be seen in a new way. “Historian Sally Banes, in titling her book on the Judson Dance Theatre DEMOCRACY”S BODY, aptly identified the revised image of the dancer as an embodiment of the revolutionary spirit of the day, a sort of relief map of cultural unrest.” (Jowitt1988) 

In 1964, Nancy graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a BA in Dance; a devotee of the Cunningham Technique, she hoped to become a member of this NY-based troupe. This did not come to pass. She did, however, move to NYC where she performed with many choreographers in the post-modernist and more traditional modern dance scene of the 1960’s, among them Art Baumen, Elizabeth Keen, Katherine Litz and Deborah Hay. 

Alongside her career as a performer and teacher, she was also an independent choreographer known for her minimalist dance that was highly physical with an implicit emotional quality that often incorporated geometric patterns ( example – the chalk dance. ) These dances grew increasingly from her explorations of anatomical imagery and the precursors of what would became Topf Technique. Many years later, in 1991, in a review in the New York Times, Jack Anderson described her work “Garden Gate” as “..unhurried, rooted movement that embodied architectural characteristics of the performance space.” Reaching and swinging motions suggested the dancers had grown wings, an illusion that invested “The Garden gate with the strange exhilaration of a dream of flying.” 

In 1968, Nancy was teaching Cunningham Technique and supervising students in their performances at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was here that she met John Rolland, a student in her technique class. John had in turn taken a workshop with Joan Skinner and Marsha Paludan, both dancers exploring this new territory of the dancer’s post-fifties body, using mental imagery as a focal point. John was attempting to incorporate what he had experienced with Joan and Marsha in Nancy’s Cunningham Technique class. Nancy was intrigued, a dialogue began and Nancy was introduced to Marsha and Mary Fulkerson, also a student at the University. 

Nancy meets Barbara Clark

“Between 1968 and 1972, Topf, Rolland, Paludan and Fulkerson independently began studying with Barbara Clark, a movement education pioneer working with imagery, who in turn was carrying on the work developed by her teacher, Mabel Todd, author of the THINKING BODY – the seminal book of movement re-education, published in 1937.” (Buckwalter2010) In 1974, Nancy performed in the first formal showing of contact improvisation, an influential form of improvisation pioneered by Steve Paxton that investigated movement through the physics of weight, balance and the points of contact created between dancers. Dancers in this small and collaborative community of the late 60’s and early 70’s were sharing ideas, dancing in each others work and deeply changing the way dancers viewed their bodies, their training and in truth their entire art form. This was revolutionary.  

Nancy described her first lesson with Barbara Clark: “ Barbara placed a heel bone in my hand. I had been a student of dance since I was 4 years old… Barbara asked me how did I think this bone went in my body. I realized I had no idea. This made me aware of the deep sense of ignorance I was working with as I was struggling to become a dancer. It felt like a real injury to my psyche and my educational process, which I was destined to improve and heal in my work” (Cornfield 1996) 

Nancy continued to correspond with John, Marsha and Mary as she investigated this new territory of anatomical imagery. As a way to define what she and her collaborators were working on, they coined the term “Anatomical Release Technique” and later simply  “Release.” This “Release” work was an extension of what Mabel Todd and later Lulu Sweigard coined as “ideokinesis” – or imagined movement. This small group of collaborators was drawing from the work begun by Mabel Todd, and continued by Barbara Clark. Through their collaborations, they were creating their own ways of investigating, dancing and teaching this new paradigm.