YVONNE-MARIE SAIN ’02 Cornell ’06 Performer with Dana Foglia Dance and Broadway Underground Dance teacher in New York and Connecticut
GRETEL SCHATZ Dance Program Director
GRETEL: I really admired Yvonne’s tenacity, because she auditioned [for dance company] and didn’t get in, but she kept working, she took feedback, and she was positive and funny and spunky about it. I love my students who just want to give dance a try, but Yvonne was driven. Once she got into dance company, she stayed. And she lived next door to the dance studio on the Northfield campus, so there was this really natural way of bumping into her. I think our personalities are similar, too—we’d just rather be in the dance studio.
of here, you can be a dancer.” Then I thought, “There’s hope for me. I can do something I love.”
YVONNE: Dancing was what got me through the day sometimes. I had always thought that if you wanted to be a dancer, you had to drop out of school and study ballet six hours a day—until Gretel told me, “You can dance for the rest of your life. As soon as you get out
YVONNE: It was hard, mentally—going to a different place, a different aesthetic, and learning all these different things and thinking, “This is weird.” Gretel made me understand that you should try to learn everything.
24 I NMH Magazine
GRETEL: So much of my work is about getting rid of the prima donna posturing. Having this attitude about being the best dancer is not going to make you a good dancer. It’s about learning from others rather than wanting to have the best pirouette. We need to look to each other and see what we can learn, and Yvonne jumped right into that right away. There was never any junk.
GRETEL: Ballet is important; it’s like learning grammar. But once you know your grammar, you can write in all different styles. YVONNE: I remember feeling drawn to Gretel because I wanted to be like her. It sounds crazy, right? But I loved the way she was creative, and I felt like we were making fun stuff, even though sometimes it was dark and sometimes it was confusing. It was cool. Gretel pushed us like that. I can’t tell you how many things I tell my students, word for word, that I remember Gretel telling me 12 years ago, about discipline and work ethic—learning what worked for me and holding onto that and making sure I give those same things back to my students.