Lisa Nelson is an American dance-maker, improviser, videographer, and collaborative artist. [1] She was born in New York City in 1949 and currently[ when? ] lives in Northern Vermont. [2]
The City of New York, usually referred to as either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2018 population of 8,398,748 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 19,979,477 people in its 2018 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 22,679,948 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Vermont is a U.S. state in the New England region. It borders the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. Vermont is the second-smallest by population and the sixth-smallest by area of the 50 U.S. states. The state capital is Montpelier, the least populous state capital in the United States. The most populous city, Burlington, is the least populous city to be the most populous city in a state. As of 2019, Vermont was the leading producer of maple syrup in the United States. In crime statistics, it has ranked since 2016 as the safest state in the country.
Lisa Nelson began her training in traditional modern dance and ballet as a child at the Juilliard School in New York City and then Bennington College in Vermont. In the 1970s, she became interested in diverse approaches to dance improvisation, including performing with Daniel Nagrin’s Workgroup in 1971-72. [2]
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance, primarily arising out of Germany and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ballet is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread, highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary based on French terminology. It has been globally influential and has defined the foundational techniques used in many other dance genres and cultures. Ballet has been taught in various schools around the world, which have historically incorporated their own cultures and as a result, the art has evolved in a number of distinct ways. See glossary of ballet.
The Juilliard School is a private performing arts conservatory in New York City. Established in 1905, the school trains about 850 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, and music. It is widely regarded as one of the world's leading drama, music and dance schools, with some of the most prestigious arts programs.
In 1973, she began a ten year investigation of video and dance from which she developed an approach to spontaneous composition and performance under the name ‘Tuning Scores.’ Beginning in 1974, she took part, along with dancers Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and others, in the early evolution of Contact Improvisation, and was a crucial observer of its development through her work with video. [3] In the ensuing decades, she has worked extensively with Steve Paxton, in particular on two improvisation duets that they performed together for several decades: PA RT (1978) and Night Stand (2004).
Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. He was a founding member of the experimental group Grand Union and in 1972 named and began to develop the dance form known as Contact Improvisation, a form of dance that utilizes the physical laws of friction, momentum, gravity, and inertia to explore the relationship between dancers.
Nancy Stark Smith is a dancer and founding participant in Contact Improvisation.
Contact improvisation is a form of improvised dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness.
Throughout the 1990s, in collaboration with K. J. Holmes, Karen Nelson [4] and Scott Smith, she developed the ensemble structure of the Tuning Scores, that she teaches internationally. [5]
She is recognized for her editorial and journalistic contributions on dance and improvisation and is the co-editor of the bi-annual dancer's journal Contact Quarterly. [6] Her writings have appeared in Nouvelles de Danse, Contact Quarterly, Writings on Dance, ballettanz, Movement Research Critical Correspondance, and sarma.be. [5]
She received a NY Bessie award in 1987 and an Alpert Award in the Arts in 2002. [5]
The New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessie Awards are awarded annually for exceptional achievement by independent dance artists presenting their work in New York City. The broad categories of the awards are: choreography, performance, music composition and visual design. The Bessie Awards were established in 1983.
The Alpert Award in the Arts was established in the 1994 by The Herb Alpert Foundation in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). The foundation provides $75,000 annual fellowship to five artists in the field of dance, film and video, music, theatre, and visual arts.
Lisa Anne Loeb is an American singer-songwriter, producer, touring artist, actress, author, and philanthropist who started her career with the platinum-selling number 1 hit song, "Stay " from the film Reality Bites, the first number 1 single for an artist without a recording contract. Her studio albums include two back-to-back albums that were certified Gold; these were Tails and the Grammy-nominated Firecracker.
Dance improvisation is the process of spontaneously creating movement. Development of movement material is facilitated through a variety of creative explorations including body mapping through levels, shape and dynamics schema.
Judson Dance Theater was a collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, Manhattan New York City between 1962 and 1964. The artists involved were avant garde experimentalists who rejected the confines of Modern dance practice and theory, inventing as they did the precepts of Postmodern dance.
Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York.
Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement.
Simone Forti, is an American Italian Postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950's, Forti has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world. Her innovations in Postmodern dance, including her seminal 1961 body of work, Dance Constructions, along with her contribution to the early Fluxus movement, have influenced many notable dancers and artists. Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and has since worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, Robert Morris and others. Forti's published books include Handbook in Motion, Angel, and Oh Tongue. She is currently represented by The Box L.A. in Los Angeles, CA, and has works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Robert Ellis Dunn was an American musician and choreographer who led classes in dance composition, contributing to the birth of the postmodern dance period in the early 1960s in New York City.
Pierre Droulers is a French and Belgian choreographer and dancer.
Cheryl Pallant is a poet, author, dancer, performance artist, and professor who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She has published several books of innovative poetry, nonfiction, and has been featured in several anthologies. Her background as a writer and dancer has led to frequently merging these disciplines.
Patrice M. Regnier is an American choreographer, director, producer and inventor. She is the developer of the TERP system, a patented and trademarked technology to facilitate choreographed movement without rehearsal.
Françoise Sullivan, is a Canadian painter, sculptor, dancer and choreographer.
Barbara Dilley (Lloyd) is an American dancer, performance artist, improvisor, choreographer and educator, best known for her work as a prominent member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1963-1968), and then with the groundbreaking dance and performance ensemble The Grand Union, from 1969 to 1976. She has taught movement and dance at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, since 1974, developing a pedagogy that emphasizes what she calls “embodied awareness,” an approach that combines dance and movement studies with meditation, “mind training” and improvisational composition. She served as the president of Naropa University from 1985 to 1993.
Sarah Michelson is a British choreographer and dancer who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work is characterized by demanding physicality and repetition, rigorous formal structures, and inventive lighting and sound design. She was one of two choreographers whose work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the first time dance was presented as part of the bi-annual exhibition. Her work has also been staged at The Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kitchen, and the White Oak Dance Project. She received New York Dance and Performance awards for Group Experience (2002), Shadowmann Parts One and Two (2003), and Dogs (2008). She has served as associate director of The Center for Movement Research and associate curator of dance at The Kitchen. Currently choreographer in residence at Bard's Fisher Center, she is the recipient of their four-year fellowship to develop a commissioned work with Bard students and professional dancers.
Mary Overlie is an American choreographer, dancer, theater artist, professor, author, and the originator of the Six Viewpoints technique for theater and dance. The Six Viewpoints technique is both a philosophical articulation of postmodern performance and a teaching system addressing directing, choreographing, dancing, acting, improvisation, and performance analysis. The Six Viewpoints has been taught in the core curriculum of the Experimental Theater Wing within Tisch School of the Arts at New York University since its inception (1978).
Contredanse is a documentation center for contemporary dance funded by the French Community of Belgium and is located in Brussels. It provides choreographers and dancers with tools and resources to connect their studio practice with academic inquiry by providing documentation about the philosophy of movement, body, composition and a history of the discipline. Their services include providing information about the sector, trainings, publishing and documentation.
The Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program is a fall semester study away program of Trinity College based at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. The program is part of the Trinity College Office of Study Away, with students from various other liberal arts colleges enrolled in the program every year. Undergraduate students take classes and workshops that vary across all topics of interdisciplinary art, including acting, dance, performance art, puppetry, site-specific theatre, playwriting, directing, and media-based performance. Each student works at an internship/field study in an arts organization twice a week. Students also attend 3-4 shows a week in all disciplines of performance. Throughout the semester, students create and showcase original pieces, with a final performance presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
This article about someone associated with the art of dance is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |