The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance at Princeton University announces three additional artists as Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence for the 2022-2023 academic year: Brian Brooks and collaborators Eiko Otake and Merián Soto. The three choreographers will discuss and share recent work while in short residencies at Princeton developing new work with access to the Center’s studios and other resources.
Launched in 2017, the Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence Program fosters the Program in Dance’s connections with the dance field. It provides selected professional choreographers with resources and a rich environment to develop their work and offers opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage with diverse creative practices. The artists share their work and processes with the Princeton community through workshops, conversations, residencies, open rehearsals, and performances. The program is designed to be flexible enough to create meaningful interactions between artists and students, allowing artists to develop engagement activities to suit the interests of the students, and allowing students to create projects that involve the selected artists. Other examples of such engagement activities include guest-teaching a class, selecting students to apprentice as choreographic assistants, participating in dinners and conversations with students, and advising student projects.
Brooks, Otake and Soto join three 2022-23 Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence from the fall who staged works for the Princeton Dance Festival: Ronald K. Brown and the team of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, Princeton Class of 2006.
Otake and Soto will discuss their ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations that include choreography and video in a moderated artists’ talk while in residence in Princeton’s Program in Dance on March 30 at 4:30 p.m. in the Hearst Dance Theater in the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus.
Eiko Otake. Photo credit: Yukari Kuremiya
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement–based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, she now performs as a soloist and directs her own projects collaborating with a diverse range of artists. After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko & Koma created 46 interdisciplinary performance works, two career exhibitions, and numerous media works. Since 2014, Otake has performed her solo project A Body in Places at over 70 sites. In addition, she has performed in post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima for A Body in Fukushima, her collaboration with historian/photographer William Johnston, which has produced many exhibitions, screenings, and performances, as well as publication of a book and a feature-length film. In 2017, Otake launched a multi-year Duet Project, a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaboration, including with Soto, that Otake directs and in which she performs. In 2022, Otake and Elise Butterfield co-curated the first iteration of the installation I Invited Myself at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The second iteration at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College is Otake’s first museum solo-exhibition. She is also presenting the installations Mother at the Historic Chapel in the Green-Wood Cemetery and Drawing in Circles with Joan Jonas at the Castelli Gallery. She regularly teaches at Wesleyan University, New York University, and Colorado College. She received an honorary degree from Colorado College in 2020.
Merián Soto. Photo credit: Maggie Loesch
Dancer, choreographer, and video artist Merián Soto is the creator of aesthetic-somatic dance practices and methodologies, Branch Dancing and Modal Practice. Her more than 40-year career has spanned various artistic movements. Soto has collaborated extensively with visual artist Pepón Osorio on full-evening interdisciplinary works such as Historias (1992-1999) and Familias (1995). She is known for her experiments with Salsa, in works such as Así se baila un Son (1999) and La Máquina del Tiempo (2004). Since 2005 she has developed Branch Dancing, a meditative movement practice with branches that investigates consciousness in performance. The Branch Dance Series includes dozens of performances on stage, in galleries, video installations, and year-long seasonal projects. Soto is founding artistic director, along with Patti Bradshaw and Pepón Osorio, of Pepatián, the Bronx-based, multi-disciplinary Latino arts organization. Since 1999, Soto has taught dance at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is curator of the Temple University Institute of Dance Scholarship’s Reflection/Response Choreographic Commission. Among many accolades, Soto is the recipient of a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for sustained achievement (2000), a Greater Philadelphia Dance and Physical Theater “Rocky” Award (2008), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2015), and a United States Artists Doris Duke Fellowship in Dance (2019). Her current projects include Fenomenal, Rompeforma 1989-1996, a documentary co-directed and produced with Viveca Vázquez; ongoing collaborations with Eiko Otake, Awilda Sterling, and Silvana Cardell; and Legacy Unboxed, an archival and exhibition project in collaboration with Liz Lerman, Jawolle Zollar, Joanna Haigood, and Eiko Otake.
On April 20 at 4:30 p.m. Brooks and members of Brian Brooks/Moving Company will present an open rehearsal of a new work-in-progress developed during his Hearst residency, as well as excerpts of past repertory works, followed by a conversation in the Hearst Dance Theater.
Brian Brooks. Photo Credit: Alexander Iziliaev
Brian Brooks, a Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography, recently completed a Mellon Foundation Creative Artist Fellowship at the University of Washington and three years as the inaugural Choreographer-in-Residence at Chicago’s Harris Theater for Music and Dance, creating dances for Hubbard Street Dance, Miami City Ballet, and others. His New York City-based group, the Moving Company, has been presented by venues including The Joyce Theater, New York City Center, Jacob’s Pillow, the American Dance Festival, and BAM’s Next Wave Festival. From 2012-2019, Brooks created multiple duet productions in which he performed alongside New York City Ballet Associate Artistic Director and former principal dancer Wendy Whelan. He has choreographed several Off-Broadway productions including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), directed by Julie Taymor; and Pericles (2016), directed by Trevor Nunn. In conjunction with his extensive teaching, he has created dances for Princeton University, Rutgers University, The Juilliard School, Boston Conservatory, and Ballet Tech. For five of his 12 years as a teaching artist at the Lincoln Center Institute, he served as the elected chapter leader of the TA Union, represented by the United Federation of Teachers. He was a founder and managing director of WAX from 1999-2004, an organization that provided services to over 750 emerging performing and visual artists through subsidized rental packages and hands-on production assistance at its flexible theater space and gallery in Brooklyn.
Both the March 30 and April 20 events are free and open to the public. The Hearst Dance Theater is an accessible venue with wheelchair and companion seating in the front row and mezzanine. An assistive listening system is available. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at LewisCenter@princeton.edu.
Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence are chosen yearly through a nomination process and include choreographers at various stages of their careers exploring a wide range of aesthetics, including those who may not otherwise fit easily into the Dance Program’s curriculum. The Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence program is supported through a gift from Margaret C. and William R. Hearst.
Visit the Lewis Center website for more information on the Program in Dance, the Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence program, the Princeton Dance Festival, and the more than 100 other performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures offered each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free.
