Greacian Goeke & Margo Hackett
Greacian Goeke. I was born and raised in Kingston, New Jersey, a village founded in 1675, near Princeton, about an hour from New York. Though I have lived for the past 38 years in the Bay Area, I still consider myself a Jersey girl. Place and history are central to who I am.
My teaching has always focused on nurturing creative expression. While finishing a graduate degree at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in 1989, I began working in residence in the San Francisco public schools teaching drama and movement integrated with the curriculum. For nine months in 1996 I donned a hard hat as drama and music Artist in Residence at the San Francisco “dump” through the Make Art Not Landfill program and worked with 15 elementary schools.
Since 1997 I have also worked collaboratively with elder adults to create dance, music, poetry and visual art from their life stories. In 2008 I founded my elder dance ensemble, Impromptu No Tutu, based at Albany Senior Center, to show the world what dance in later life can be. We collaborate with the Albany Preschool next door to offer Tall and Small intergenerational dance classes, and travel to other community sites to share the joy of movement as ambassadors of creative aging, defying expectations of the expressive power of aging bodies.
My M.F.A. is in Performance, a new major at that time at CCAC. I hold a B.A. in English from Cornell University where I studied with writers William Matthews, Archie Ammons, James McConkey and Robert Morgan, and also trained in modern dance and choral singing. My movement training is grounded in the practice of T’ai Chi Ch’uan (Yang style), which I have studied and taught since 1999, and in improvisation through the work of Spolin, Halprin and numerous Orff master teachers. I have also studied Dalcroze Eurythmics at Carnegie Mellon University, and body percussion and world drumming through local community groups.
Music, dance and writing are the heart of my life. I am a core member of Dance Generators, the intergenerational dance ensemble based at University of San Francisco. I have received two grants from Dancers’ Group for an ongoing a community dance project in Mountain View Cemetery that I co-direct with psychologist Kaethe Weingarten. We are co-authoring a book, “Moving into Wisdom,” based on our movement research with community groups in the cemetery and other venues exploring life, aging and freedom of imagination. We recognize the need particularly during the pandemic for connecting through movement, and offer creative opportunities over Zoom.
Margo Hackett. When we talked about a bio for this project, Margo said, “My garden is my resume.” She listed these collaborators: “Nasturtiums, roses, roses, roses, raspberries, fava beans, plums, lavender and purple clematis, foxglove and fig trees; an apple and a pomegranate tree, blueberries going into their third year. Giant garlic, artichokes, hydrangeas made up of ancient lace clouds. The most exciting thing this year is the poppies. I spread seeds around the garden last fall. In late January there were Thalia white daffodils. Also sky-blue Scilla pieced with bright yellow oxalis. And the old wisteria vine that weaves it spell in and out of the house. There are old-fashioned freesias but despite what they told me at the nursery, mine have no scent.”
A writer, Margo has also made her garden a palace of poetry. She started her poetry wall 30 years ago and it is now a favorite pause on the “heart attack” steps of her neighborhood.
“When you have your own poetry wall you can do whatever you want,” she observed. The first poem she posted was William Carlos Williams’s poem about plums, “This is Just to Say.” She leaves the poems up until they wear out. “Everyone can have a poetry place. Just choose a friendly telephone pole and start posting with a staple gun. Your neighbors will thank you. Poems need to live outside of books and they like being all mixed up with nature and people.”
Margo has roots on the eastern seaboard and in the Arizona desert. She has touched down for important life chapters in Bolivia, France and at the San Francisco Symphony. After many decades in Berkeley she accepts she is a Berkeley resident. But her first home of the heart is Fire Island.
“I don’t think about the future at all. I can’t even think about the present—it’s a completely different life now. If I thought about it, would I freak out, keep it at arm’s length? It’s a hovering life now. There is no substance. At the same time, it’s an emergency.”