Dance Bio

Peter and Mary Alice’s career leading dancing with children started in 1975 when they first met at a contradance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They both became avid dancers, and, a few years later when they became elementary school music teachers, traditional dance was a big part of their curriculum.

They started leading elementary school residencies of traditional dance, song and storytelling in Vermont, New England, and throughout the northeast.  In 1991 Peter and Mary Alice started publishing, with Andy Davis and Mary Cay Brass, collections of their favorite dances and singing games for children under their collective name “New England Dancing Masters” (“NEDM”).  Over the next twenty years, as these NEDM dance collections became widely used in elementary music classrooms throughout the United States,

Mary Alice and Peter were invited to lead elementary music teacher workshops of traditional dance, song and storytelling in almost every state of the Union.  They were headliners at several national American Orff Shulwerk Association and Organization of American Kodaly Educator Conferences.  Peter and Mary Alice are regular dance and song leaders at the Country Dance and Song Society’s summer family camps in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and West Virginia.