Margaret Eginton

Biography

Margaret Eginton holds a BA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA in Theatre Arts from the University of Iowa. She was trained in Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Work by master teacher Lydia Yohay in New York City and qualified as a Registered Movement Therapist and Educator after examination by the International Somatic Movement and Education Association in 1994. For other training please see bottom of the page. Currently she is Head of Movement and Dance at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Acting Training (MFA) in Sarasota, FL, where she served as Interim Director in 2004-2005, and an adjunct professor of acting and movement composition at New College of Florida. She maintains a private practice in Eginton Alignment in Sarasota, and travels to teach workshops in the United States and Europe. Previously she developed movement programs for the innovative Atlantic Theater/Practical Aesthetics Studio in NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, and the American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. She has been a master teacher for Atlantic Theater since 1993 and now teaches her work in their advanced acting program in the summer. From 1998-2002 she was the resident movement coach for the professional American Repertory Theatre, and coached plays for many directors including Scott Zigler and Kate Whoriskey. She has taught Cunningham and Petronio dance technique classes in New York and on tour and for the Sarasota Ballet. As a free lance coach she has worked with actors, business speakers, and dancers, and maintained private alignment studios in New York, Iowa City, and Cambridge. Margaret has been invited to teach Eginton Alignment for Roy Hart Theatre Pedagogy Group, Theatre de Vevey, the University of Bologna, Moscow Art Theatre School, the Vakhtangov School, the Experimental Theater Wing at Tisch School for the Arts in New York University, the University of Iowa, Yale University, Harvard University, Principia College, and the International Institute for the Performing Arts/Paris. She lives in Sarasota FL, with her son. What Else Has Margaret Done? Margaret (Meg) Eginton began her career as a leading dancer in the companies of Merce Cunningham and Stephen Petronio, and received a Dance and Theatre Bessie Award in 1987. She also danced with Douglas Dunn and was a member of Mary Overlie’s first Viewpoints group. She maintained her own company, Meg Eginton and Dancers, for eight years, and was produced by all major venues for postmodern dance in New York, including P.S. 122, The Kitchen, Dance Theatre Workshop, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and abroad in France and Italy. Grants and Fellowships for choreography included 3 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, 2 grants from New York State Council for the Arts, 3 Dance Chance Grants, and an American Dance Festival Fellowship. She starred on Broadway opposite Bill Irwin in Largely, New York, and acted off-Broadway with Naked Angels, Manhattan Class Company, American Place Theater, HB Studios (opposite Herbert Berghof), and in a film with Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman). In 2007 she played the three most important women in Anton Chekhov’s life in My Mocking Happiness in St. Petersburg and the International Volkov Theatre Festival in Yaraslav, RU. She is an inactive member of AEA, SAG, AFTRA, and AGMA. She has directed plays, music theater, and opera at: New York Hometown, Backlot Arts, International Institute for the Performing Arts/ Paris, Inner Ear, the University of Iowa, Harvard/ART Institute, FSU/Asolo Conservatory, Moscow Art Theatre Studio, Theatre de Vevey, Teatro Forli, Seattle Opera, Studio@62o St. Petersburg FL, and New Music New College. Favorite productions include Cher Moliere, the premiere of Wendy Kesselman’s music theatre piece The Black Monk, David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, Parsifal (asst. director for Francois Rochaix, Seattle Opera), her own adaptations of Heiner Mueller’s Explosion of a Memory, and Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped, titled Who. Her awards for directing include 2 IRAM best direction awards from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and best direction and production awards from the Sarasota Herald Tribune and Creative Loafing. Support for her theater work has come from grants and fellowships given by Iowa Arts Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Keenan Institute at the Smithsonian, Harvard Childcare Fellowship, Backlot Arts, the Amicus Foundation, and the New College Foundation. 2009-2010 creative work includes a physical theater piece, Rat Race: The Secret Life of ThemePark co-written with Eric Paul Jakobsen which toured Florida, and Living and Dead: The Gettysburg Project, a music, text, and movement piece co-created with new music composer Stephen Miles for New College New Music. In 2011 she will again collaborate with Stephen Miles, exploring group-generated and socially constructed performance.