This year’s Eugene Lang Dance Production features works created in the Susan Rethorst Guest Artist Residency led by Jodi Melnick and Vicky Shick; guest choreographer luciana achugar; and Rebecca Stenn, Lang faculty; along with student-created works. All choreography will be performed by students of the Eugene Lang College Dance Program.
“Home to one of the more progressive collegiate dance departments in New York.” –The New York Times
Susan Rethorst
Susan Rethorst is a choreographer, writer, and teacher who has been making works of modern dance since 1975. She has been active as a choreographer and teacher of choreography throughout Europe and Scandinavia since 1995. Rethorst’s work has been presented by The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, and the Whitney Museum Of American Art, as well as at various dance theaters, universities, and festivals throughout the United States. Her work has been produced internationally by The Holland Festival, Spazio Zero Rome, The Kunsthalle Basel, Aix-en-Provence Festival, Jerusalem’s Room Festival, among others. (Foundation for Contemporary Arts)
Jodi Melnick
Jodi Melnick is a NYC based choreographer, collaborator, dancer, and teacher. Melnick designs intricate movement to explore the exquisite nature and dynamic relationships between human beings. Her dance language is quietly nuanced and pedestrian, at times wild and reckless, flooded with imagery, accumulating into dramatic content unmistakably constructed through choreographic means. The profound expression of the dancing body and her lucid performing instincts drives the creative process. The body is the aesthetic material. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally, at BAM’s Fisher theater (Next Wave Festival) City Center, The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts (NYLA), The Kitchen, La Mama, Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, Martha’s Vineyard, commissioned new works by OtherShore Dance Company, Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, George Washington University, Taryn Griggs (2014 Mcknight awardee), DanceBox in Kansai, Japan, opening the Dublin Dance Festival, Belfast, Ireland, St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia. Her most recent work, MOAT was commissioned for LMCC’s River to River festival, New Bodies, presented by the Guggenheim Museum Works in Process for NYCBallet principal dancers Sara Mearns, Gretchen Smith and Jared Angle, and collaborating with Playwright Sibyl Kempson for the ongoing solstice performances at the Whitney Museum of Art. Current project include a two week long residency (september 12th-24th) in Madison Square Park, Prismatic Park, with artist Josiah McElheny,
Vicki Shick
Vicky Shick has been involved with the NYC dance community for more than 3 decades. She was a second time Movement Research Artist-in-Residence in 2015. During her years with the Trisha Brown Company she received a “Bessie” Award for performance. Shick has been making dances since the eighties and was honored with a second “Bessie” for her collaborations with artists Barbara Kilpatrick and Elise Kermani. She has also worked with many other choreographers and performers. Shick has taught, shown work, created student dances and restaged Trisha Brown’s dances at festivals and universities, including in her hometown, Budapest. She is a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Gibney DiP grant.
Luciana Achuga
Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and most recently as part of the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015, was remounted with an all Uruguayan cast at the Festival Internacional de Danza en Uruguay this May, was presented outside as a performance/block party/urban ritual at the River to River Festival in Lower Manhattan in June 2016. She received a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography and a nomination for a BESSIE Award for Outstanding Production for her last full-evening length work An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, and most recently she received the 2017 Alpert Award for Dance and became a 2017-18 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence.
Rebecca Stenn
Acclaimed as a “rising choreographer” by the New Yorker and “vibrant, potent and darkly imaginative” by the New York Times, Rebecca Stenn, dancer, choreographer, educator, author, founded Rebecca Stenn Company in 1996. The company has since performed to critical acclaim and sold out houses in over 50 cities including such venues as The Copenhagen Festival, The Edinburgh Festival, The Joyce Theater, BAM Fisher, The Kitchen, Danspace Project and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival among many others. The company has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and the American Music Center and has been hailed in The New York Times as “a collective force…keenly pleasurable”. Recent performances include a return to the Edinburgh Festival, The Joyce Theater Family Matinee series, and solo performances at the Rubin Museum.
Stenn has been has been a contributing editor at Dancemagazine, has published work in the International Journal of Dance and the Brooklyn Rail and most recently co-authored the newly released book, A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide. Stenn is currently on faculty at The New School and Princeton University and is Choreographer-in-Residence at Dartmouth College. She has enjoyed Artist in Residencies at numerous university and college programs including Barnard College, Montclair State University (New Works Award) and University of Wisconsin (Alumni Award) among many others. Stenn most recently performed a new duet at BAM Fisher, and recently created and premiered the final evening length work in a trilogy for Rebecca Stenn Company, which was premiered June 2018 at the Gowanus Loft. She is currently working on a commission from Women In Motion, to be premiered spring 2020. Stenn is the proud mother of Jonah and Elie Weissman.
*Live Arts Plus Partner – read more about our Plus Partner program.
