Freiberg was a Lower East Side-born American dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance from her beginnings in the avant-garde NYC art world in the 1950s until her death.
[2] Her lifelong studies also included classes and workshops with the modern dancers Erick Hawkins, James Waring, Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, in addition to ballet, classical Japanese dance, traditional Balinese dance, the neuro-muscular-skeletal re-education systems of Mabel Elsworth Todd, Lulu Sweigard and Charlotte Selver, yoga, and tai chi.
[1][3] Perhaps the first major art work Sally Gross appeared in was the iconic Beat Generation 1959 film by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy,[4] where she played the bishop's sister.
She continued to participate in Dunn's classes when they moved into the basement gym of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.
During guest artist visits and her semester long residency in 2012 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Interdisciplinary Arts Institute, she collaborated on two major films with Douglas Rosenberg.
"[8] Dance historian Leslie Satin also documents that Gross began "One and Another," a 1983 solo created shortly after the death of her mother, by stating: "I always thought the time would come when I would have to say something…I wouldn’t know what to say, so I decided…to move.
"[9] In a New York Times feature article by dance critic Gia Kourlas (February 29, 2004) titled "Vibrating To The Ideas Of Beckett," Ms.
In describing her works, reviewers evoked such adjectives as simple, small-scale, workmanlike, blunt, wry, tender, delicate, elusive, fundamental, serene, mysterious, and intense unexpressed emotion.
"[11] In a 1988 review, Dunning further admired how Gross "distills powerful emotions and suggestions of social situations in small, delicate and utterly simple pieces that have the quality both of fully wrought masterworks and murmured anecdotes.
When not referencing an existing literary text, her scores could take the form of poetic bits and pieces by Gross, be a list of body parts, prepositions, numbers or compass directions, or be determined by choices of a set piece or prop, such as a bench, ladder, rope, or roll of photographic paper, and the particulars of the performing space (for instance, more than once in her career she contained a dance within the narrow grey painted stairway between the two floors of her Westbeth studio).
Revered as a teacher of movement and meditation, she invoked walking and breathing as central elements of each class, the same discipline her company maintained in their warm-up rituals.