Martha Myers, who influenced generations of dancers both as the founder of the noted dance department at Connecticut College and as the longtime dean of the school of the American Dance Festival, died on May 24 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her son, Curt Myers, confirmed her death.

Ms. Myers joined the college, in New London, in 1967 and founded its dance department in 1971. In 1969, she became dean of the festival, which presents performances and offers educational programs. It was then in Connecticut and is now based in Durham, N.C.

Charles L. Reinhart, the director emeritus of the festival, said in a statement that Ms. Myers, who was with the organization for more than 30 years, brought new dance ideas and techniques to the festival while respecting tradition.

She was particularly interested in dance medicine and in somatics, which, as she described it to The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., in 1998, is about how you can reorganize neuromuscular patterns so the execution of dance technique produces what you hope its going to produce, which is a wider range of movement qualities for the dancer.

A companion field, focused on things like physical awareness and stress reduction, is known as body therapy, and Ms. Myers preached that its ideas were useful to others beyond dancers.

Not everyone can jog, play tennis or golf, she told The Herald-Sun of Durham in 1981, when she was leading one of the festivals body therapy workshops at Duke University, so we need many different types of movement for people. Many of the body therapies can be done prone on the floor and at ones own speed.

Ms. Myers was diminutive the 1998 newspaper article said she described herself as 5 feet 2 inches and shrinking but impactful. Gerri Houlihan, a dancer, choreographer and dance teacher who considered Ms. Myers a mentor, summed her up succinctly in 2006 when Ms. Myers was feted at Virginia Commonwealth University, the successor institution to the Richmond Professional Institute, where she earned her undergraduate degree.

She has mentored so many young dancers, teachers, choreographers, Ms. Houlihan said at the time. Shes tiny and speaks in a very quiet voice, very poetic, but she persuades you to do things you never thought you would be able to do.

Martha Coleman was born on May 23, 1925, in Napa, Calif. Her father, Herbert Rockwood Coleman, died when she was a young girl, and her mother, Odie Marie Coleman, moved the family to Virginia to be near relatives.

When Martha was a teenager, a neighbor heard her singing in the garden, was impressed and connected her to a voice teacher.

During the rest of my teen years and beyond, she wrote in Dont Sit Down: Reflections on Life and Work, a 2020 memoir, I practiced, studied and dreamt of singing at the Met.

But when she was a sophomore at the Richmond Professional Institute, she auditioned for the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where the professor evaluating her gave her a discouraging assessment that killed that particular dream. It was an experience she carried with her when she became a teacher herself, resolving to have empathy when it came to young peoples aspirations.

I have counseled and encouraged, she wrote in her memoir, reluctant ever to tell a hopeful candidate that their dream is impossible.

The challenge, she continued, is to find ways to open students minds to other possibilities, encourage them to find and shape for themselves the limits of their persistence, passion and abilities.

She herself found another possibility after that disheartening singing audition: dance. She also started spending time in New York City whenever she could.

In 1948, she enrolled in a two-year graduate program in physical education with a concentration in dance at Smith College in Massachusetts. There, she first became interested in somatics. She also taught for about 18 hours each week, which she thought was excessive but, she wrote in the book, the administration argued that in physical education, and dance, there was no preparation.

After earning her masters degree, she stayed at Smith to teach. In 1959, though, she took a leave of absence to create A Time to Dance, a television program produced by WGBH in Boston featuring live performances. Its nine episodes aired in 1960 and are now viewed as a sort of precursor to Dance in America, the long-running PBS series.

Soon, she added another television credit to her rsum. She had married Gerald E. Myers, who, when he took a job at Kenyon College in Ohio, suggested that she write to several Ohio television stations pitching a health-and-exercise show. To her surprise, WBNS in Columbus invited her to audition.

I demonstrated some of the stretching and strengthening exercises that might be appropriate for an 8 a.m. viewership, assumed to be largely housewives, she recalled in her memoir. I laced explanatory, cautionary and encouraging comments into stretches and quad sets, and ladled it out in inoffensive little patties with an icing of info on nutrition, weight control and health news.

She was hired. And then, not long after, she was offered a chance to be a news anchor, a rarity for a woman in the early 1960s.

She participated in some memorable feature segments, including by joining window washers 20 stories up and by riding on the shoulders of Meadowlark Lemon, the Harlem Globetrotter, to dunk a basketball.

After a few years, her husband took a job at C.W. Post College on Long Island, and before long Ms. Myers was working at Connecticut College, where she taught for the next 25 years. Late in her memoir she talked about her approach.

Movement is hard-wired in the body, resistant to change, learned from infancy in the context of family and society, she wrote. When I urge freshness, newness and investigation, I am aware that I am asking for one of the more difficult feats of human behavior. In my teaching career I have compiled strategies which invite my dance students to find new possibilities.

Her husband, who eventually held the unusual title of philosopher in residence of the dance festival, died in 2009. In addition to her son, Ms. Myers is survived by three grandsons.

She often took her expertise to other countries as part of the festivals international outreach, trips that were challenging but also yielded humorous moments, some resulting from language barriers.

I have been surprised when a direction in a somatics class, such as imagine your bones sinking into the floor, produced a perplexed look on some students faces, and giggles from those who knew English, Ms. Myers wrote in an essay she contributed to East Meets West in Dance: Voices in the Cross-Cultural Dialogue, published in 1995. I was told later the translation was imagine your bones disintegrating or decaying on the floor.

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Martha Myers, Who Taught Dancers How to Move and More, Dies at 97 - The New York Times