Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Lewis Center for the Arts

Senior Lecturer in Dance

Photo courtesy Aynsley Vandenbroucke

About

Aynsley Vandenbroucke is a performance maker, writer, teacher, and curator who can no longer distinguish between these roles. She’s obsessed with the movement of ideas, the choreography of language and experiences. Called “gifted” by The New Yorker and “an elegant, sensitive thinker” by The New York Times, she has been making spaces for dance and words in New York since 2000.

A Laban Movement Analyst, Aynsley is passionate about the role of movement and embodiment in every aspect of life. She sees dance (whether in writing, choreographing, or teaching) as a way to explore fundamental human questions and find new perspectives at the unlikely intersections of different fields and modes of thought. Some recent explorations have included making written dances, thinking about the movement of language within dementia, and using religious, philosophical, and political texts to explore embodied transitions between stillness and movement.

She has taught interdisciplinary courses in the Program in Dance at Princeton since 2011. There she’s developed innovative courses including “Body and Language,” “Stillness,” “Power, Structure, and the Human Body,” and “Inventing Performance,” which brings together students across the arts to create new work. At Princeton, she has also taught teachers across disciplines in workshops and office hours called “Teaching and Learning for People with Bodies.” She is also a member of CreativeX, collaborating with staff and faculty members across the arts and engineering. Aynsley was on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies for five years and helped coordinate the program there.

Aynsley’s work has been performed throughout NYC (at Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, Gibney, and Baryshnikov Arts Center, among others) as well as in San Francisco, Colorado, and Brazil. Her writing has been published by PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art, Seneca Review, Imaginings—A Gibney Journal, and The Brooklyn Rail. In the spring of 2021 she edited a chapbook, Gathering Space; in it, fifteen contributors created pieces in which the violence, grief, and beauty of the early pandemic found form. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Pioneer Works, Millay Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Emergency Grant, The Manhattan Community Arts Fund, The Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Her recent performance, And, was commissioned by Abrons Arts Center. Of the piece, Eva Yaa Asantewaa wrote, “And is autobiography bridging disciplines–visual, verbal, sonic, kinetic ones. And a bibliography; Vandenbroucke’s program notes include a long list of her recent and influential reading. (Spending an hour with a smart cookie who wears her smartness with accessible humanity and ease ain’t half-bad.)” And in Hyperallergic Louis Bury wrote, “Aynsley Vandenbroucke has been exploring the relation of literary formalism to the human body in a way few writers, if any, are doing…. In these uncertain times, one thing we can be sure of is that a practice as original as hers will have more surprises in store for us on the other side of And’s conjunction.”

Aynsley co-founded Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskill mountains and served as artistic director, curator, producer, and board member there in varying degrees until it closed in 2021. She played a large role in the design and building of the studio performance space and created initiatives to support artists and welcome new audience members. The New York Times wrote, “Mount Tremper Arts has become a quietly thriving offshoot of the city's contemporary performance world: a magnet for adventurous urban artists and a devoted local audience."

Aynsley graduated with a BFA in dance from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and an MFA in interdisciplinary writing from Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts; she was supported by merit scholarships at both schools. Her previous studies include professional ballet and contemporary dance training at the The Alvin Ailey American Dance Center and Merce Cunningham Dance Studio in New York, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, The Ruth Page Foundation and Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago.

Aynsley’s work is influenced by more than twenty years of sitting and moving meditation practices, including study with Gabrielle Roth and other core teachers of the 5Rhythms, and 200-hour yoga teacher training with Guta Hedewig in the lineage of TKV Desikachar/ T. Krishnamacharya. She is currently learning to DJ—and loves the ways it naturally extends her work supporting dance, community, and connection with those quiet (and sometimes wild and loud) parts of ourselves.