New faculty Q&A: Betty Skeen

Betty Skeen

Dancer Betty Skeen’s first performances weren’t for critics or crowds. 

“My mother tells me my earliest performances took place for an audience of stuffed animals and two tabby cats in the backyard of our family home in Beaufort, South Carolina,” she recently recalled. 

Now Randolph’s visiting assistant professor of dance and director of the College’s Helen McGehee Visiting Artist Program, Skeen still draws inspiration from those childhood moments. 

“A career’s worth of formal training and traditional performance opportunities followed these early movement investigations,” she said, “but I think I must give first credit to the teachings of the magnificent live oaks and their hanging mosses, the unpredictable ocean winds and their almost-still edges of marsh air, and the magnificently loud cicada scores of my childhood summers.”

Skeen attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, studying in “a rigorous, conservatory-style, ballet-focused program directed by Stanislav Issaev,” she said. 

“While ballet and I have never quite seen eye to eye, I was incredibly grateful to be a part of the dance program and to have attended the Governor’s School. It was like pure oxygen to be in a high school designed for and entirely populated by serious young artists.”

Skeen earned her undergraduate degree in dance from Sweet Briar College and her MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. She spent nearly a decade working in New York City and the Hudson Valley before returning to Sweet Briar as a professor in 2020.

In addition to her freelance performance and choreography credits, Skeen is an extended company member with Pearson Widrig Dance Theater. 

Her original work has been shown extensively in the Metro-D.C. area, as well as in New York City, Brooklyn, the greater Hudson Valley, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Italy, and she is an American College Dance Association honoree and the recipient of two Metro-DC Dance Awards.

This fall, she’s teaching Beginning Dance, Technique & Repertory, 20th Century American Dance History, and a conditioning class called Stretch, Strengthen, and Recover. 

When did you know you wanted to teach?

My best childhood friend and I spent many after-school afternoons in self-designed training sessions that covered subjects such as baking, horsemanship, boat building, dog training, mermaid folklore, wilderness survival, and dancing, too, of course. To me, there is something endlessly wonderful and hopeful about people coming together to learn something new, to figure out something about this truly mysterious world together. It will always be a profound honor to be called a teacher, and I am grateful and humbled when I find myself a part of an institution or collective that instigates, creates, and protects space for meaningful human discovery. Randolph College does this beautifully. 

Describe your teaching style. What can students expect in your classes?

I hope that the word “playful” might be included. I take dance as a form and its place as the bedrock of creative human expression very seriously, and I want the atmosphere of my classroom to be one that encourages rigorous play. Cultivating this atmosphere actually requires a significant amount of effort and is sometimes harder to achieve in a classroom of adults than one might think. Productive play demands a constant infusion of serious discipline and an elusive blend of genuine effort and effortlessness, constructive failure, resilience, creative adaptation, self-awareness, trust, generous joy, and deep curiosity. In my experience, if you’re doing it right, you’ll likely find yourself drenched in sweat at the end of a class!

What attracted you to the job at Randolph? 

Randolph College is committed to creating a learning environment where all community members are valued and supported, where the diversity of ideas and perspectives of its members is seen as essential to the work, and where the responsibility to protect academic and intellectual freedom is taken seriously by all. With record enrollment numbers this year, it seems to me that Randolph College is doing all the right things. Additionally, dance at Randolph has such a rich and impressive history. It is an absolute honor to be here. 

What are your initial impressions of Randolph and its students? 

Awesome! The dance students have welcomed me so warmly, and they are all so clearly dedicated to their work. The students in the Technique and Repertory class even asked if we could meet for class over the Labor Day break. Love! The Beginning Dance class has totally stolen my heart. What an inspiring and fantastically fun group. If you are in that class and reading this, please consider joining the Tech and Rep class next session!

What do you like to do outside of the classroom, as far as hobbies or other activities? 

I am the mother of two extraordinary girls, the partner of a very talented comic book publisher, and the wrangler of four poorly behaved, but ultra-sweet rescue dogs, so I rarely need to look for additional activities outside of the classroom to stay busy. 

I love being in natural spaces, and I particularly enjoy hiking. Hobbies? I was recently gifted an accordion (the really heavy, full-sized kind) and a full set of crystal singing bowls for my 40th birthday. I have been experimenting with playing the accordion and the singing bowls simultaneously. Does that count?