photo by Lise Metzger*

2013 is off to a whirlwind start.

Arena Stage will premiere my new work “Healing Wars” for 3.5 weeks as part of their 2013-14 subscription series. Dance never gets to run this long unless its The Nutcracker (!)

I curated Wesleyn University’s “Innovations: Intersection of Art and Science” symposium, bringing together teams of artists and scientists from across North America to share approaches, skills, and outcomes of their work together.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and I led a plenary session at APAP on the great convergence of arts and activism, and then together we co-taught a week-long intensive at Harvard called The Discipline of Creative Research.

A national project that I instigated and which has been brewing for a couple of years, to bring together artists & arts-institutions with neighboring scholars & academic institutions through a focus on our Civil War, officially launched in late February. It’s called the National Civil War Project and you can read a bit about it in the New York Times. As part of this work, I’ve been guest-teaching in classes at George Washington University, and will have a mini-residency on-campus with some of my “Healing Wars” cast in April: we’ll interview nurses and veterans, and develop new material.

I taught in Montclair State University’s innovative new course “Creative Thinking,” keynoted at Goddard College’s MFA program in Creativity, taught Critical Response Process and choreographic tools to students at Sonoma State University, and visited Rutgers University to guest-teach in Keith Thompson’s classes there. Here at home in Baltimore I got to teach local practitioners my Critical Response Process in a weekend workshop hosted by Akimbo Dance, and led a seminar for students at MICA.

I re-convened with my Dance Exchange colleagues around my 2005 piece “Small Dances About Big ideas” when the Covenant Foundation invited Dance Exchange, myself, and our “Small Dances” commissioner Martha Minow (dean of the Harvard Law School) to a retreat where a new documentary about “Small Dances” was shown.

In the music world I’ve continued my consulting with the Boston Conservatory, and am engaged in deeply interesting conversations with conductor Jim Ross at University of Maryland – College Park about another orchestral/movement collaboration for 2014, to follow our 2012 experiment with “Afternoon of a Faun.”


2012 was busy. Here is some of what I was up to:

Revising this website: come back to see the new design in a few weeks.

Developing new work with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar: at APAP in NYC, at the Manhattan JCC, in performance at Symphony Space (NYC), at Center Stage in Baltimore, in residence at Florida State University, and back at the Manhattan JCC this fall and next spring.

Developing my work “Healing Wars” (set to premiere at Arena Stage in 2014) in Florida at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam; in Yaroslavl, Russia, at the International Festival of Movement and Dance on the Volga; in Baltimore, hosted by Performance Kitchen; through research with roundtable participants at American Repertory Theater’s “Civil War and Medicine” meeting, and with neuroscientists at Virginia Tech.

Collaborating with other artists: with conductor James Ross to animate “Afternoon of a Faun”; co-teaching with David Gordon at Dance Base in Scotland.

Teaching my Critical Response Process in England at the London Sinfonietta; in Cork, Ireland at the Theatre Development Centre; in Chicago with the League of Chicago Theatres; and in Lincolnshire, Illinois, with high school teachers.

Intensive academic residencies at Wake Forest and at University of Georgia

Teaching twice at Haystack on Deer Isle, in Maine; at the National Orchestra Institute in College Park, MD; at Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute in New Orleans; at Montclair State University to help develop their new coursework in Creative Thinking; at Carnegie/Juilliard’s Academy program for professional musicians and public school music teachers in NYC.

Keynoting at the Bealtaine conference in Dublin, Ireland; at Interlochen Academy 50th anniversary; for the NAMESU (National Association of Music Executives at State Universities) annual meeting in Washington, DC; and for the faculty conference of Higher Order & Thinking Schools, Hartford, CT.

Leading a group session at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT)

Consulting at the Boston Conservatory (Boston, MA), and for Luminate (Age Scotland) in Edinburgh.

Walking & talking to create a new Treadmill Tape with the president of Wesleyan University

In December I’ll be co-teaching a special one-week intensive at Yale School of Drama with James Phills of Stanford (Graduate School of Business); and in January I’ll co-teach an intensive Harvard with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

Stay tuned for more!