Growing up in Middlebury, Vermont, a small New England college town, choreographer Margo Van Ummersen got an early start on her career. "I took dance classes at the college when I was five," she relates. "I fell in love with dancers and dancing." Though she shelved dance in favor of theater and sports in high school, Van Ummersen went on to earn degrees in modern dance from Macalester College in Minnesota and from the University of Oregon (1992). "I was introduced to contact improvisation in 1986," she says. "My work is eclectic -- very influenced by contact improv." Now a part-time dance instructor at LCC, she devotes the rest of her energy to the Van Ummersen Dance Company, founded in 1994. "It's always been a group of six or seven women," she says. "Most are choreographers in their own right." The company's most recent full-evening dance series, a collaboration with fiber artist Marilyn Robert and composer David Snider entitled Body, won the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation's Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists. A Hult Center performance of Body is scheduled for January.