The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance at Princeton University announces three artists as Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence for the 2024-2025 academic year: Rennie Harris, Matthew Neenan, and Yue Yin. As guest artists, all three are creating new works or teaching repertory works that will be performed at the Princeton Dance Festival in November.
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.
Rennie Harris. Photo credit: Ann Summa
Rennie Harris toured with the Fresh Festival 1984, the first national hip-hop tour in the U.S. In addition, he has performed and worked with artists such as Run DMC, Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, Salt N Peppa, LL Cool J, Brandy, Madonna, Boys to Men, Will Smith, The Roots, and Raekwon The Chef (Wutang Klan), among others. However, Harris is most known for bringing social dances to the concert stage and coining the term “Street Dance Theater.” Harris has broken new ground as one of the first hip-hop choreographers to set works on ballet-based companies such as Ballet Memphis, Colorado Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), Giordano Dance Chicago, Lula Washington Dance Theatre, Cleo Parker Robinson, Dallas Black Dance Theater, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and others. He is the first street dancer to be commissioned to create an evening-length work on Alvin Ailey American Theater and to serve as a resident artist at the Alvin Ailey school for dance. Harris received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2001 and was nominated for three Bessie Awards in 2023 for the remounting of Rome & Jewels. He has received five Black Theater Alvin Ailey Awards, a Herb Alpert Award, and was nominated for a Lawrence Olivier Award (U.K.). Voted one of the most influential people in the last one hundred years of Philadelphia’s history (City Paper), Harris has been compared to Basquiat, Alvin Ailey, and Bob Fosse. He has also received Dance Magazine‘s Living Legend Award (2017) and a Lifetime Achievement Award in choreography (McCullum Theater 2019). In addition, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, a U.S.A. Artist of the Year Fellowship, and a Governors Artist of the Year Award, and he is noted as the first street dancer to receive two honorary doctoral degrees from both Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and Columbia College in Chicago. In 1986, Harris served as a cultural ambassador for former President Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Embassy Tour, and in 2001, he was invited to the White House by the Clinton Administration to share in the recognition of African American artists making a difference in the world. Harris received a medal in choreography from the Kennedy Center and has performed for such dignitaries as the Queen of England and the Princess of Monaco. He was chosen as one of four U.S. dance companies to serve as hip-hop cultural ambassadors for President Obama’s Dance Motion U.S.A., touring throughout Israel, Jordan, and Ramulah.
Through a co-curricular teaching and rehearsal process throughout the fall semester, Harris has been reimagining a hip-hop work from his renowned repertory to custom fit the talents of his Princeton student cast.
Matthew Neenan. Photo credit: Alexander Iziliaev
Hailed by The New York Times as “one of America’s best dance poets,” Matthew Neenan began his dance training at the Boston Ballet School and with noted teachers Jacqueline Cronsberg and Nan Keating. He later attended LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and the School of American Ballet in New York City. Neenan performed with Pennsylvania Ballet (now Philadelphia Ballet) from 1994-2007 where he danced numerous principal roles in the Balanchine and contemporary repertoire. He was also the Ballet’s resident choreographer from 2007 to 2020, where he created 20 ballets. In 2006, Neenan co-founded BalletX with Christine Cox. BalletX has toured Neenan’s choreography globally and to prestigious venues such as New York City Center, The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, The Vail International Dance Festival (where he has created six world premieres), and Jacobs Pillow Festival, among many others. He has created world premieres for the New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, The Washington Ballet, Ballet West, Nashville Ballet, BodyTraffic, U.S.C. Kaufman School of Dance, and The Juilliard School, among several other companies and institutions. He has received numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, The Pew Charitable Trust, The Choo San Goh Foundation, The Independence Foundation, and four fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Also working with students through a co-curricular teaching and rehearsal process, Neenan is choreographing a new ballet work for his Princeton cast.
Yue Yin. Photo credit: Steven Trumon Gray
Yue Yin is a choreographer, founder and artistic director of YY Dance Company, and the creator of the trademarked FoCo Technique. She began her training in Chinese classical and folk dance in China at the prestigious Shanghai Dance Academy and completed her M.F.A. in dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2008. In 2018, Yin founded her non-profit, contemporary dance company dedicated to the teaching, production and performance of her original choreographic work. Her signature FoCo Technique fuses elements of Chinese classical dance, folk forms, ballet, and contemporary vocabulary. She utilizes this technique in training and creative processes to achieve a textured and grounded physicality in energetic, complex and nuanced choreography. In 2021, Yin was the recipient of the prestigious Harkness Promise Award, which recognized her innovation in choreography and education. She was the winner of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago 2015 International Commissioning Project, the 2015 BalletX Choreographic Fellowship, and of the Northwest Dance Project’s 5th Annual Pretty Creatives International Choreographic Competition in 2013. Yin’s work has been commissioned by Gibney Company, Martha Graham Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, BalletMet, Boston Ballet, Philadelphia Ballet, Limon Dance Company, Alberta Ballet, Balletto Teatro di Torino, Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, The Juilliard School, U.S.C. Kaufman School of Dance, Tisch School of the Arts, Rutgers University, Point Park University, and West Michigan University, among others.
Choreographer-in-Residence Yin is working with Princeton students through a co-curricular teaching and rehearsal process to restage an excerpt of Ripple, her 2021 contemporary work rooted in Chinese classical and folk dance.
“For a young dancer, it would be thrilling to get to work directly with any one of these acclaimed choreographers,” said Susan Marshall, Director of the Program in Dance. “Our students have the opportunity to not only work with one of these artists, but to also observe the processes and choreography of all three. This is a rare opportunity.”
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.
The 2024 Princeton Dance Festival will be performed on November 22 at 8:00 p.m., November 23 at 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and November 24 at 2:00 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center. Other works to be performed include an excerpt from Stephen Petronio’s Lareigne (1995) staged by Davalois Fearon, a new contemporary dance-theater work by Raja Feather Kelly, and a new contemporary work by Rebecca Lazier. The November 22 performance will be open-captioned, and a Relaxed Performance will be offered on November 24.
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.
