Jacqulyn Buglisi was a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance company for 12 years. In 1993, she co-founded Buglisi Dance Theatre. She is the chair of the Graham-based modern department at The Ailey School, where she has been teaching for more than 25 years.

Here, student Courtney Celeste Spears demonstrates a short phrase from Martha Graham’s 1947 piece Night Journey. This combination, which Buglisi uses for across-the-floor work, employs the famous Graham contraction and works on maintaining parallel, moving in space with weight shifts and finding oppositional strength in spiral.