The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance at Princeton University announces three additional artists as Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence for the 2023-2024 academic year: Roderick George, Gabrielle Lamb, and BRKFST Dance Company. All the artists are creating new works for Princeton students or guest teaching in spring classes. They join Amy Hall Garner, Shamel Pitts, and Donna Uchizono, who were Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence during the fall semester, and whose work was featured in the Princeton Dance Festival in December.
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.
Roderick George. Photo Credit: Michael Jackson, Jr.
Roderick George, born and raised in Houston, Texas, spent his formative years training at Ben Stevenson’s Houston Ballet Academy, The Alvin Ailey School, and the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He was a bronze winner of the Youth American Grand Prix in 2005, a YoungArts Winner, and a Presidential Scholar of the Arts in 2003. He has danced for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Basel Ballet/Theater Basel, GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, and The Forsythe Company. In addition, George has performed the work of choreographers such as Marie Chouinard, Peeping Tom, Jorma Elo, Jacopo Godani, William Forsythe, Johan Inger, Jiří Kylian, Sharon Eyal, Ohan Naharin, Benoit Swan-Pouffer, and Richard Wherlock.
During his Hearst residency, George will be guest teaching in the spring dance course, “Building Physical Literacies: Practices in Contemporary Dance,” an advanced studio course taught by Davalois Fearon and Rebecca Lazier that compares practices and performance methods of diverse approaches to the body and community in contemporary dance. Through a comparative embodied approach, students train intensively with a rotating faculty to develop physical research built on a synthesis of experiences.
Gabrielle Lamb. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Pigeonwing Dance
Gabrielle Lamb, choreographer and 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, is based in New York City, where she directs Pigeonwing Dance, described by The New Yorker as “eccentric…playful…curious.” Her work has also been presented by the American Ballet Theatre Incubator, the New York Choreographic Institute (an affiliate of the New York City Ballet), the MIT Museum, BalletX, the Juilliard School, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Ballet Collective, Whim W’HIM, Jacob’s Pillow, and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center. She has won fellowships and competitions at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Milwaukee Ballet, and the Banff Centre, as well as the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award and a Princess Grace Award. A native of Savannah, Georgia, she trained at the Boston Ballet School and was a longtime soloist at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, later performing with Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company and Pontus Lidberg Dance in New York City. She has been lauded by Dance Magazine as “a dancer of stunning clarity who illuminates the smallest details—qualities she brings to the dances she makes, too.” Her upcoming commissions include the Savannah Music Festival, New York Theatre Ballet, and Milwaukee Ballet, as well as Rising, a live music and dance collaboration with composer Robert Sirota and the Grammy-nominated Neave Trio.
While in residence on campus with her company, Lamb has been choreographing a new contemporary ballet duet for seniors Laura Haubold and Vivian Li that will be performed at the Dance Program’s Spring Dance Festival on March 29 and 30. In addition, she will be guest teaching in Tina Fehlandt’s spring course, “Approaches to Ballet: Technique and Repertory,” an advanced studio course in classical and contemporary Ballet technique with explorations into neoclassical and contemporary choreography through readings, viewings, and the learning of and creation of repertory and examination of ballet’s response to recent social movements.
Members of BRKFST Dance Company. Photo Credit: Shane Wynn
BRKFST Dance Company, founded in 2014, seeks to create intellectually rigorous, physically demanding works of art through abstraction, breaking, and contemporary dance vernacular, continuously exploring original modes of artistic expression. BRKFST’s egalitarian and choreographic collaboration is rooted in the hip-hop adage, “Each One Teach One”. Regardless of class, race, experience, age or gender, everyone remains both teacher and student. BRKFST’s lineage stems from breaking and hip-hop culture: earning respect from battles and embodying inclusivity by passing down their knowledge to the new generation. The lived experiences of this collective, who identify as working class, queer and BIPOC, inform their compositions. BRKFST performs regionally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, premiering work at the Walker Arts Center, Southern Theater, The Cowles Center and Orchestra Hall with The Minnesota Orchestra; nationally in the Belding Theater with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in Hartford, Connecticut, and internationally in Dublin, Ireland, for Dance2Connect (D2C) Hip Hop Festival. Their film Dreamers (2019) was an official selection in 11 international film festivals receiving the Grand Jury Award (In/Motion Festival 2021) and Best Experimental Film (Tirana International Film Festival 2020). BRKFST has set repertoire and original work with dancers at St. Olaf College and Carleton College in Minnesota, D2C Hip Hop Festival in Ireland, Bates Dance Festival in Maine, and the University of Minnesota. BRKFST Dance Company’s awards include Creative Residency at The National Center for Choreography-Akron, National Performance Network Creations and Development Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project Production Grant, Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support Grant, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation USArtists International Grant, and a Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Arts Activities Grant. Members of the BRKFST company that will be in residence at Princeton are Lisa ‘MonaLisa’ Berman, Joseph ‘MN Joe’ Tran, Travis ‘Seqal’ Johnson, Azaria Evans-Parham, and Marie Thayer.
Members of BRKFST will be guest artists in the spring course, “Approaches to Contemporary Dance and Movement Practices: Hip-Hop,” taught by Joseph Schloss and Raphael Xavier, an advanced studio course exploring the technique, aesthetics, cultural contexts and histories of hip-hop dance forms, including the deeper Afro-diasporic aesthetic principles that guide those movements as well as their connection to other art forms of hip-hop culture, and in Xavier’s “Introduction to Breaking: Deciphering its Power,” an introductory course that gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore the flow, power and cultural contexts of Breaking.
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 to learn more about the Program in Dance, the Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence Program, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
