Our Dance Instructors
Ruth Botchan is the director of Berkeley Moving Arts and artistic director of The Ruth Botchan Dance Company. A choreographer and modern dance instructor for more than thirty-five years, she has taught at the Erick Hawkins School in New York, where she also studied with master teacher and pioneer modern dance choreographer Erick Hawkins, and trained with Andre Bernard and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in body alignment and and Body-Mind Centering. Ruth brings these principles to her teaching of modern dance. Her classes emphasize a strong center and free flow of movement through the limbs. She is also a certified Pilates instructor.
Avilee Goodwin has studied Erick Hawkins Modern Dance technique for thirty years, currently with Ruth Botchan and is a member of The Ruth Botchan Dance Company. She began studying the dances of Isadora Duncan with Lois Ann Flood six years ago. She teaches young choreographers at De Anza High School in Richmond, and has been a dance instructor for the Advanced Beginning Class at our East Bay dance center since 2014.
Lenzie Williams has studied with Tai Chi master Ben Lo since 1975, and has been teaching Tai Chi classes in Berkeley since 1977. For the last ten years he has been teaching Tai Chi workshops nationally and internationally. The Tai Chi training system taught Lenzie the process of gaining deeper and deeper wisdom of the body, heart, mind, and spirit which he passes along to his students. Lenzie’s classes provide the context to come together as individuals on their unique journeys, to work as a group through the art of Tai Chi Chuan, to contribute to classmates’ development and one’s own self-cultivation, thereby allowing students to actualize their best selves and reach their full potential as human beings.