Dance Faculty

Rebecca Lazier

Rebecca Lazier headshot

Photo by Bentley Drezner

About

Rebecca Lazier choreographs and directs a project-based group of dancers in New York and is a Senior Lecturer in dance at Princeton University.  A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia and a Julliard alum, she has produced her work in Hartford, Los Angeles, Istanbul, and, for the past 15 years, New York. Recently a film of her piece Coming Together/Attica, which premiered at The Invisible Dog in June 2013, was featured in the exhibit IK-00 Spaces of Confinement produced by Moscow based foundation v–a–c the art of being contemporary in Venice, Italy as part of the Architecture Biennale. In July 2014, Coming Together/Attica toured to the Moni Lazariston Festival in Thessaloniki and the Patras International Festival in Patras, produced by the American Embassy in Athens. In New York Lazier’s work has been presented at many venues including La MaMaMoves! Festival, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum, 92nd Street Y, Joyce SoHo, and Movement Research at the Judson Church. The company has toured to a variety of locales from Martha’s Vineyard to Los Angeles, Jacob’s Pillow to New Orleans, from Nova Scotia to Canada and Turkey.

Lazier has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, New Music USA’s 2013 Live Music for Dance Program, Canada Council on the Arts, and the Greater New York Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. She has been artist-in-residence at Movement Research, The Joyce Theater Foundation, The Yard and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program.

Rebecca has been on faculty at Princeton University for 12 years and previously taught at UCLA, Mimar Sinan Conservatory in Istanbul, Trinity College, Hartford Ballet/University of Hartford, and Wesleyan University. She has been a guest artist at numerous institutions including James Madison University, Muhlenberg College, Columbia College, Shenendoah Conservatory, Interlochen Arts Academy, Hartford Springfield College, and Dance Nova Scotia. She is currently on the faculty of the Summer Program at the Mark Morris Dance Center.

Rebecca recently joined the Editorial Board of the journal Dance Practices in the Classroom published by National Dance Educators Organization. She has led working groups at CORD, presented her paper “Plan Critically to Teach Creatively” at NDEO, and been on panels at Gina Gibney Dance Center, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, and The Julliard School.

We Roar Podcast June 2020

Dancing with Ourselves: Performing Arts and Movement in the COVID Era

Social distancing has devastated the performing arts and changed how we move through public spaces. Princeton senior lecturer in dance Rebecca Lazier considers the impact on artists, theaters and venues, and how we’re all navigating a new concept of togetherness.

Read the transcript

Spinal Tap 2016

lazier bookshelf

Princeton professors unpack their summer reading lists

What are we looking at?
The books in the photo are part of my “go-to” collection. I have read each many times and they remain in my office as inspiration and a resource when working with students. The books fall into three general categories: creation, anatomy and context. These three spheres are the philosophic center of my teaching. I hope students will link their creative voices with their physical discoveries, their intellectual pursuits with improvisational tangents. Whether meeting with a student to discuss their thesis, helping them discover ways to move with less restriction, or exposing them to the wealth of dance history and research, together these books guide us to new territory.

What’s on your summer reading list?
The moment the semester ends in the spring I give my brain — and my feet — a break and go on a fiction binge. During the academic year I focus on books and journals related to the courses I am teaching and try and keep up with The New Yorker.

Books collect in piles by my bed throughout the year. Right now there is three-foot high stack waiting for me. This summer I’m looking forward to delving into Edith Pearlman’s collection of short stories, Binocular Vision. I find there is a piercing clarity to her prose.

Last summer I read Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, his chronicle of living under death threat for nine years, and it inspired me to put Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on my list for this year. It seems an apt political time to revisit controversy.

Come August I will dig into newly published books in the dance field as well as catch up on recent journals and articles. I have been saving choreographer Meg Stuart’s Are We Here Yet? and Kathan Brown’s John Cage, Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind until I have the time to savor each page. That time is coming.


This content is courtesy of Michael Hotchkiss and Jamie Saxon, Princeton University Office of Communications.

Coming Together / Attica

Links

Short films from Spring 2015 dance tour in Turkey | 3.Açık Dans Stüdyosu

What I Think: Rebecca Lazier” | Princeton University, March 2016

“Improvised dance embodies complexities of social decisions” | Princeton University, Feb. 21, 2019

“Relationships That Endure” | Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 5, 2019

“Funding the next big idea: New projects receive Dean for Research Innovation awards”
— NODES: Net tOpology and Dance Exploration Systems with Rebecca Lazier and Sigrid Adriaenssens | Princeton University, June 8, 2020

“Dancing with Ourselves: Performing Arts and Movement in the COVID Era” | We Roar Princeton podcast, June 18, 2020

 

 

Campus Address

Wallace Dance Building W312
Lewis Arts complex
122 Alexander Street

Campus Phone

609.258.7837

Email Address

rlazier@princeton.edu