Margaret Eginton

Director/choreographer Margaret Eginton is a former Movement and Dance Coach of the American Repertory Theater and teacher of Movement for actors and directors in the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. For the A.R.T. Institute she directed Howard Brenton's Sore Throats, Margeurite Duras's Savannah Bay, Irene Fornes's Sarita, and a movement theater piece employing Heiner Müller texts. As movement director and choreographer she collaborated with François Rochaix on A.R.T. Institute productions of Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo and Country Fever with Goldoni, and with Scott Zigler on The Importance of Being Earnest. Ms. Eginton also directed premiere productions of the Russian writer Sergei Task's Modi, Russian artists Komar and Melamid's The Life of Stalin, Part II, and Wendy Kesselman's music theater piece The Black Monk. She has also adapted Euripides' Electra and Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped. She was movement consultant to the original production of the Blue Man Group and for the films Pretty Girl; Madeleine; and I Love You, I Love You Not, starring Claire Danes and Jeanne Moreau. She began her career in the 1970s performing all over Europe and the United States as a dancer in the companies of Merce Cunningham, Douglas Dunn, Mary Overlie, Andrew deGroat, and Stephen Petronio. Her dance choreography was produced in New York by Dance Theatre Workshop, The Kitchen, P.S. 122, and The Whitney Museum, in cities from Rome and Naples to Paris. After retiring as a dancer and before committing entirely to teaching and directing, she worked for a time as an actress, making her Broadway debut starring opposite Bill Irwin in his play Largely New York, and also acted with Mabou Mines, Naked Angels, Manhattan Class Company, Herbert Berghof.  She appeared in the film Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino, and in commercials and voiceovers. She holds an MFA in directing and is a Registered Movement Therapist trained in Alexander and Feldenkrais Techniques and examined by the International Somatic Movement Therapy Association. Ms. Eginton has also taught at Yale University, the University of Iowa, The Moscow Art Theater School, Vakhtangov School, and in Rome, Naples, and Zurich. Ms. Eginton has received several awards for her dancing and directing, including a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist in Residence Fellowship for three consecutive years, and two IRAM best direction awards from The Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She has published works in Performing Arts Journal, Live, Dance Magazine, Dance Ink, and was a contributing editor to The Poor Dancers Almanac.