Obituary

Obituary: The New York Times
Nancy Topf, 55, a Choreographer and Teacher

By JENNIFER DUNNING
SEPT. 9, 1998

Nancy Topf, a choreographer, dancer and teacher, died last Wednesday in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia. She was 55 and lived in Manhattan.

Ms. Topf performed with many choreographers in the post-modernist and more traditional new modern-dance scene in New York City during the 1960's, among them Art Bauman, Elizabeth Keen, Katherine Litz and Deborah Hay. She began a career as an independent choreographer and performer in 1969, becoming known for minimalist dance that was highly physical with an implicit emotional quality and that often incorporated geometric patterns.

Reviewing Ms. Topf's ''Garden Gate'' in 1991 in The New York Times, Jack Anderson wrote of unhurried, rooted movement that embodied architectural characteristics of the performance space. ''Reaching and swinging motions'' of the arms, Mr. Anderson wrote, suggested the dancers had ''grown wings, an illusion that invested 'The Garden Gate' with the strange exhilaration of a dream of flying.''

In 1974, Ms. Topf appeared in the first formal showing of contact improvisation, an influential form of fluid physical improvisation based in the gaining and losing of balance. She developed a technique of neuromuscular retraining, which involved a repatterning and realignment of the body that many dancers found helpful for healing chronic injuries and focusing on their creative work. Ms. Topf had a private practice in New York and was also an internationally known teacher. When she died she was flying to Geneva to teach.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Ms. Topf received her primary training from Merce Cunningham and Barbara Clark but also studied with Robert Joffrey, Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton and the H. B. Studio. She also wrote about contact improvisation and reviewed dance for publications including Dance Magazine, The New York Times and The Village Voice.

Ms. Topf is survived by her husband, Jon Gibson, a composer with whom she often collaborated, and a son, Jeremy, both of Manhattan; her mother, Celia Topf Straus of Lauderhill, Fla., and three sisters, Bobbi Straus of Port Washington, N.Y., Peggy Schwartz of Amherst, Mass., and Margie J. Topf of Boston.