Laurie Deyo: A Life Taking Big Leaps Onstage and Off
Now 70, she has been non-stop since she trained in New York City and did musical theater in the New York metropolitan area and then brought all that experience to Syracuse in 1984
By Carol Radin

“I love, love, love to jump!” These are hardly surprising words coming from dancer Laurie Deyo, who has spent her life taking big leaps onstage and off.
Now 70, she has illumined CNY dance ensembles and schools for the past 40 years with her performances in modern dance, her choreography and her dance instruction.
Deyo’s career on Syracuse’s dance scene has covered the gamut: Performances with the Syracuse Contemporary Dance Company in the 1980s and then again in the 2000s; teaching on the dance faculty at Syracuse University; currently teaching children and adults at the Syracuse Ballet and Dance Center; and choreographing for all of the above as well as for past performances with the Syracuse Orchestra when it was Symphoria.
“I can’t not move!” Deyo exclaimed. She has been non-stop since she trained in New York City and did musical theater in the New York metropolitan area and then brought all that experience to Syracuse in 1984.
When Deyo started dance as a serious pursuit, she was not nearly as young as the children in her classes now. In high school, the closest she got to musical movement was being a drum majorette. She was athletic, which would certainly serve her well in her future years of dance.
“I could throw a football better than a quarterback!” she said.

Here’s the key: Deyo was also intensely musical and it was actually her pursuit of flute, piano and voice in high school that led her to major in music at Hope College in Michigan. Though she switched out of the major in her senior year, opting for a major in elementary education, she took a dance course, got hooked and completed a minor in dance.
That led to Deyo’s first big leap. The small town girl from Holland, Michigan — population 26,000 — moved to New York City – population 17 million plus.
“I learned a lot very fast!” she laughed.
Immersing herself in a master’s degree program at NYU, she studied the styles of ground-breaking contemporary dance masters Jose Limon, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham and completed a master’s degree in dance and dance education. She danced in NYU’s Kaleidoscope Dancers and had the great opportunity to perform for a show in Carnegie Hall Recital Hall. After completing her degree in 1980, her talent in voice and dance landed her professional engagements in musical theater productions from Edison, New Jersey’s famed “Plays-in-the-Park,” to Kingston, to Connecticut. In just a few years, she did eight to 10 shows in suburban theater venues, cartwheeling across stage in “Hello Dolly,” working with Actors’ Equity performers and practicing in a studio where her instructor had danced for George Balanchine.
“Hello Dolly” was a particular favorite of hers — who wouldn’t want to sing every day to “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” or do a “fun crazy number” like “Before the Parade Passes?”
In another production, the musical, “Carousel,” she had the part of “Carrie.” So she got her chance to sing solos and duets and speak lines.

It was all exhilarating. And then Deyo took another big leap into the unknown. In 1984, she moved to Syracuse with her husband at the time. It was a small pond, for sure. However, not one to sit around thinking about getting adjusted, Deyo launched into the Syracuse dance scene right away. She began to teach classes at the Syracuse School of Dance (which has since become part of the Syracuse Ballet and Dance Center) and from there connected with the Syracuse Contemporary Dance Company to perform on stage. There was no doubt she would make her mark in Central New York as a performer and instructor. Jazz, ballet, tap, modern dance, even aerobics — you name it, she moved it and taught it.
Just two years after her arrival in Syracuse, Deyo was offered a position on the dance faculty at Syracuse University’s Exercise Science department. It was the beginning of a rich and varied career in which her education background, dance and movement studies and her “Can’t NOT move” approach to life infused both the students and programming. SU dance students asked her to be the adviser for “DanceWorks” and help them develop from a club into a more serious performance group presenting for audiences. With her stage experience and her creative eye and ear for choreography, Deyo was just the spark they needed.
During those years, what else did she do? What didn’t she do?
She asked the question, ‘why is there not a dance minor?’ and then answered her own question by creating a formal 22-credit dance minor, which SU now offers. She held full-time positions in undergraduate academic advising and in undergraduate and graduate admissions advising and recruiting for the School of Education, as well as her part-time faculty position. In her spare time — spare time? — she returned to the Syracuse Contemporary Dance Company to perform occasionally and, starting in 2010, began to teach modern dance at the Syracuse Ballet and Dance Center in DeWitt.

Deyo retired from SU in 2015. While she stopped performing on stage at age 64, her involvement is still quite demanding in the dance classroom, where she puts her best dancing foot forward to explain and demonstrate technique. Deyo’s teaching style balances her personal warmth and insight with the exacting professional whose students sense pretty quickly when it’s time to drill down on technique.
She teaches adult, youth and children’s classes and has students aged 6 to 71. Senior adults can and do sign up for her classes. Although Deyo advises that they have some prior dance experience and a level of fitness that the movement demands.
She also continues to choreograph works. It has been a natural evolution for her as a musician and dancer who loves the challenge of combining mind and body, then translating that to a performance where her dancers can communicate Deyo’s intent and make it their own.
“My inspiration is the music first,” Deyo said, explaining her process. “My musical background gave me the sense of how different parts of dance and movement work with music. That’s allowed me to create pieces that played to all the underlying elements in the music.”
Over the years, her choreographed performance pieces have drawn on the music of Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Gloria Estevan, Mary Jo Blige and the 1980s heavy metal group, Metallica. Other arrangements incorporated the music of Michael Jackson’s “We Are the World” and Wicked’s “Defying Gravity.”
Deyo had a particularly extraordinary moment in 2012, when she performed in her own choreographed work.
“I never do that because I want to observe,” she said.
This time was different, though. She had created the dance for a group of six to go with the song, “Living Proof” from the 2011 movie “The Help,” a story based on 1960s Mississippi and the Civil Rights movement. Becoming part of her own interpretation onstage was, “very emotional for me,” she said.
Deyo’s first love is jazz, so her antenna is ever up for ideas that are outside-of-the-box.
“I don’t do a lot of unison,” she said of her compositions. One example of that was evident in a recent Everson Museum performance by her pre-teen students. Deyo had the dancers in three groups, the middle group following one pattern and the groups on either side of the middle mirroring each other, but not duplicating the middle group. So it was a set of interesting fragments unified into a whole. Ever the educator as well as dancer, Deyo adjusts her compositions according to the age group performing them. As this particular performance began, Deyo, the teacher and choreographer, rushed out to the side aisle in the audience to observe. No doubt secretly counting, spacing and moving limbs inside her head. She was beaming.
Deyo and her husband, Michael Spencer, live in Syracuse. Spencer is also a musician who sings and plays piano and guitar for the Syracuse Pops Orchestra and also plays every Sunday at the Park Central Presbyterian Church in Syracuse. Deyo’s two adult children are, like their mom, committed musical performers as well. Her daughter, Kelsie, takes dance courses with her mom and is very active in local musical theater productions. Her son, Austin, is a drummer now based in New York City, where he does solo as well as group performances and participates in recording sessions. So the whole darn family follows the beat. Deyo and Spencer also have two young grandchildren, whom Deyo babysits for as regularly as her non-stop life permits. Chances are the little ones will be tapping out tunes for themselves before too long and making great leaps in true Deyo spirit.