Early Years
Her father’s career took her family to Puerto Rico where she spent her childhood years in the beauty and freedom of its tropical environment, taking drawing classes, performing in a small flamenco company, playing guitar, and singing South American folk songs. This experience proved to have a seminal influence on her future career.
Returning to Washington, D.C. for her last two years of high school, Marilyn studied painting at the Corcoran Gallery and then attended Oberlin College, with a career in the arts in mind, and graduated in 1950. She was soon drawn to the program of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus Institute of Design in Chicago and their tradition-challenging approaches to the visual arts, architecture, and design. It was in experimenting with the dimensionality of sculpture combined with student dance classes in improvised movement that she had this epiphany: “I discovered I could BE the sculpture!” which led to two summer sessions with Hanya Holm at Colorado College and further solidified her shift from painting to dance.
Read more about this topic: Marilyn Wood
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 23:10,11.