The Bronze Medal Guide To: Dancing Through Life

For Michele Rusinko

Michele Rusinko died on Monday, January 22, 2024. She was a VIP to me and to many.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s like to grieve when you share a person with so many other people who are also grieving. It is a different grief. We grieve our individual experience of a person, but we also recognize the impact that this person had on a whole group of others, all of whom had equally important relationships with the same person. And we grieve together and separate, all at once. And we share our experiences with each other of that person like a bookmark in our favorite stories.

This was my experience with Michele Rusinko. 

I almost didn’t meet Michele. I quit dancing for the first time when I was 18, and Michele was the head of the dance department at my college. I went a whole year without dancing my freshman year and fell into a deep depression. The solution to that was obviously to dance again. So, though I wasn’t sure I was good enough to dance again, I took a ballet class at Gustavus. It was a beginning ballet class, just to get back into the groove. But Michele was my professor, and she encouraged me to try out for the dance company. This single choice changed the entire trajectory of my college experience. 

If you danced for Michele, you knew this look well. She is deep in the dance, collecting her thoughts.

Michele saw things in me that I never saw in myself. And she did that for so many people. 

She ended up being my advisor as we designed my dance major together. But when I talk about Michele, I don’t know how to classify her, because she was my advisor, but she was also my mentor, she was also my friend, she was a spiritual advisor, she was a champion, and she was there for me on many occasions when I wasn’t sure anyone was. With a sure and steady hand and a 30,000-foot view.

She was a big dreamer, and she had this way of pulling the right people together to make her dreams come to life because she was so good at identifying people’s gifts. I am realizing as I write this that she is the reason I get excited to be near people who are dreaming of big things. When you can be near it, you can be part of it, and the joy of watching the dream take shape is creative euphoria. 

Michele in Seed For Planting: Homage to Käthe Kollwitz

Michele built community. I need to give you a quick history lesson for context. Dancers have a tradition of wishing each other “merde” before a performance. It’s the dance equivalent of “break a leg.” Don’t say that to a dancer. In 19th-century Paris, a theater surrounded by horse-drawn carriages would signify a full house. And the longer the curtain call, the bigger the pile of horse “merde.” Wishing a dancer “merde” is a way of saying, “I hope for a packed house, a lot of horses, and a really big pile of shit.”

Michele noticed in her time at Arizona State University that dancers would wish each other merde, but not everyone would give and receive the wish. So, she changed that. She created a tradition that everyone who ever danced under her learned. Prior to a performance, we would stand in a circle, give the person next to us a knee to the rear, a wish of merde, a kiss on the cheek, and pass it on. This tradition was so important that it reaches through time and space for 40+ years worth of dancers who worked with her. This tradition of our merde circle goes on and on, and the circle is wide. 

So wide that just last April, Michele brought us all together for an all-dance reunion to mark her retirement. That would be the last time I and many others would see her. And we ended our time together with the world’s largest merde circle. It was the least we could do and also the most we could do, and it was a living eulogy to the person we shared.

Michele at the all-dance reunion in April of 2023. Filled to the brim with happiness, and exhausted from the dance she was in at the moment. When she asked me to emcee the event she wasn’t sick, yet. I said to her, “I’m a has-been. I don’t know that you want me to do this, there will be far more important people in the room.” and she said, “you are exactly the right person.” I am so glad I said yes and had the opportunity to honor her in this way.

When I used to choreograph, I always hated figuring out the ending. And now I know why. We all leave this world in the middle of the dance. There is always a little dance left in us, and a dance that goes on once we leave. This will happen for all of us. None of us will escape it.

What Michele taught me and continues to teach me is to stay in the dance. No matter what is going on, there is a dance in it. And the dance is beautiful, and challenging, and tragic, and blissful, boring, and unexpected. And other dancers will come in and out and in and out again. And we will never regret dancing for as long as we are able as who we are in each moment. 

These words feel incomplete and not sufficient to honor this person, who was pivotal for so many. And my grief is fresh and disorganized. But here’s what I know: Michele lived merde. She played for a packed house, and her curtain call will be long, and the pile of horse shit is huge. And I love her. And I will miss her.