Meet Cara · Before acupuncture
Twenty years on stage.
The name Turning Pointe comes from a first career. Cara was a professional dancer in New York for two decades before she trained in acupuncture.
The name is a play on two words. Pointe is the ballet technique of dancing on the very tips of the toes, which Cara spent twenty years refining on stage. A turning point is the moment a life changes direction. For Cara, that was leaving performance for medicine. For many patients, it is the first visit.
Cara has been dancing since she was three. She grew up in Glen Cove and trained under Charmian Surface and then Francis Patrelle of Ballet Academy East before going on to the School of American Ballet. As a young dancer with Dances Patrelle she performed in Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Firebird, and The Yorkville Nutcracker, sharing the stage with Cynthia Gregory, Jock Soto, Jenifer Ringer, and Leda Meredith.
She studied dance at Skidmore College and finished with a BFA in Dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, then apprenticed with Jennifer Muller/The Works. Over the years she appeared in works by Mark Morris, Kevin Wynn, Ann Reinking, Ellen Sinopoli, Deborah Jowitt, and Gus Solomons jr., and performed across New York and the tri-state area with Nimbus Dance Works, Nathan Trice, Martha Bowers, SODance Collective, and Kim Whittam and Company, among others.
Her longest home was Niles Ford's Urban Dance Collective, which she joined in 2001 and later served as company manager and rehearsal director. With the company she performed at the Open Look festival in St. Petersburg, the Florence Dance Festival in Italy, and the International Art of Movement Festival in Yaroslavl, and appeared in an award-winning dance documentary at the New York International Film Festival.
Two decades of training the body to move with precision now inform how she reads a patient: where tension gathers, how a joint compensates, what rest actually requires. The practice name carries both halves of that story: the pointe work of a dancer, and the turning point when she traded the stage for the treatment room.