Amy Chavasse, educator, choreographer, performer, improviser and storyteller, comes to Michigan after six years as Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College. She has been a guest artist/faculty member at numerous institutions, including Arizona State, Virginia Commonwealth, UNC-Greensboro, NC School of the Arts, George Washington, Bennington College, University of Calgary, and Cornish College of the Arts.
As a choreographer and performer, she has collaborated and worked with many notable artists, including Peter Schmitz, Lisa Gonzales, Sue Rees, Rodger Belman, Donnell Oakley/everything smaller, Xan Burley, Alex Springer, Caroline Chavasse, and Paul Matteson. As Artistic Director of ChavasseDance&Performance, her work has been presented throughout the U.S.: Dance New Amsterdam (NYC), 100 Grand, Judson Church, WaxWorks, Triskelion, The Dance Place (Washington, D.C.), San Diego, Broadway Performance Hall (Seattle), The Flynn Theater (Vermont), Arizona, and several seasons with Dance Alliance’s North Carolina Dance Festival, the American Dance Festival: Acts to Follow and Fast Forward, and Reynolds Theater.
In the fall of 2006, she premiered All I Ask of My Enemies at Dance New Amsterdam in NYC, then brought the full evening of work—I Sleep With Ann Coulter and Other Impossibly True Stories—to the Duderstadt Video Studio. She presented I Sleep With Ann Coulter at the BAAD! Ass Women’s Festival in the Bronx in 2007, and I Sleep With Ann Coulter and I Wish I Was the Lucky Girl Who Sleeps With Condi Rice in 2008.
Internationally, she has taught and her work has been produced in Trinidad, Cienfuegos and Havana- Cuba, Kaunus and Vilnius-Lithuania, Vienna-Austria, and Buenos Aires. With her strong emphasis and interest in international dance forms, she has devoted significant time and energy into bringing guest artists to the UM Department of Dance such as Grupo Krapp. In 2006, she organized a residency with one of her most influential mentors, Daniel Nagrin, at Michigan. After touring to Cuba, where she worked with Compania de la Danza Narciso Medina in Havana, she helped to coordinate a U.S. tour by his company to NYC, Middlebury College, and Maine. In May, 2007, she traveled with U-M student to Cali, Colombia to teach, perform and present a lecture on Improvisation. In summer of 2009, she completed her third summer performing, choreographing, and teaching at Florence Dance Week-Firenze and Pro Danza Italia in Castiglioncello, Italy, also participating in Fiesole Dance Festival and Argentario Dance Festival in Porto Santo Stefano.
At the University of Michigan, she has participated in Arts on Earth’s Art and War and Arts and Minds, choreographed for several Collage concerts, and School of Music, Theatre & Dance Scholarship Showcases. She’s created two new works for the dance department’s annual Power Season and in 2009 re-staged Laura Dean’s master work from 1985, Impact, in collaboration with the School’s Percussion Ensemble. She danced in the companies of Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians, Bill Young and Dancers, and in many independent projects in NYC. She danced with Maida Withers and Deborah Riley in D.C., William Whitener in Seattle, and Jean Issacs in San Diego, and continues to make dance/theater works using storytelling, video, humor,and wildly eclectic movement to comment on political and social issues for her company and for her solo repertory. She published an article, “ A Brief Travelogue to Buenos Aires” in DanceVoice NC in 2006, chronicling her research of political dance and theater in Buenos Aires.
At Michigan, she has created new courses for the Department of Dance: Social Issues in Dance, and Performance of Improvisation. She received a Choreographer’s Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1998, and her work and research has received support from public and private foundations, including the Moore Charitable Foundation of New York and from the Center for World Performance Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a long time participant in the American College Dance Festival and joined the national board in 2009. She received her BFA in dance from the NC School of the Arts and her MFA from the University of Washington.
