“A relief these days to see movement treated as a sufficiently expressive medium.” Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

“His work marries the best elements of classical form with the freedom and expressiveness of modern dance… The overall feeling for the observer is one of exhilaration and awakening.”   Leona Baker, Style Weekly

“The most striking piece was Colin Connor’s Streets and Legends… Fascinating.”   Jack Anderson, The New York Times

“A work both majestic and elegiac…The power of News Falls Like Rain is that it has the ability to evoke some of the reality of our own lives.” Bill Gale National Public Radio

RECENT WORK

Most recently, 21 years after its premiere, the Pas de Deux from his Vestiges was performed at Richmond Ballet’s Studio 1, September 14 to 23. See excerpts HERE. Julinda D. Lewis wrote in RVArt Review: “A beautifully balanced collaboration powered by dynamic, spiraling interactions… this one was more about fiery passion.” In collaboration with the Oklahoma International Dance Festival and Micah Bullard (now with Dance Theatre of Harlem), he has created a new solo and film: From Where I Stand. It premiered in Tunisia and an excerpt can be seen here: From Where I Stand. His first creation this year for live audience was The Sea Cleans The Shore, for Island Moving Company, with nine dancers and live music. A celebration of the ability to be dancing and making music together again, The Sea Cleans The Shore was inspired by the regenerative power of nature, especially the sea. With music by Maurice Ravel, the work was described as “powerfully evocative” by Kathryn Boland in Dance Informa.

Colin Connor’s wide ranging dance career encompasses being the award winning choreographer of over sixty works, the Artistic Director of the American legacy Limón Dance Company, an educator at many of the world’s foremost dance centers, a Professor Emeritus at the California Institute for the Arts, and a widely recognized dancer.

Born in London, UK, Mr. Connor began dancing in Canada, was a soloist with the Limón Dance Company for eight years, guest performed with several other companies, and toured extensively with his own work. His dancing prompted responses such as “wheels and pitches like a sun falling through the heavens” in the New York Times, “Achieving moments of great beauty and showing that intensity of movement which is characteristic of really fine dancers” in Spain’s El Pais, and “The dancer with force in his blood moves differently from the one who wears his nerves on the edge of the skin” in Mexico’s Uno Mas Uno.

Mr. Connor’s over sixty choreographic works span the worlds of contemporary, ballet and flamenco companies. He was the winner of the Sarasota Ballet’s International Choreography Competition, with Full Sail - in praise of storms, and the Charleston Ballet Theatre’s Fountainhead Choreography Competition. His works have been presented across the Americas and Europe, including at the Joyce Theater in New York (The Weather in the Room, The Body Is a House without Walls, Corvidae, Vestiges and Streets and Legends,)the Momment’Homme Festival in Montreal (The Survivor,) Jacob’s Pillow (Corvidae and August,) The Holland Festival in Den Hague (Absence is Never Far,)and the Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporanea in San Luis Potosi, Mexico (The Rosegarden.) A guest choreographer at both The Yard and The Carlisle Project (twice each), he was in residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography for a creative process with the Limón Dance Company.

His work includes radical collaborations that mine aesthetic juxtapositions such as: Solea and the Winds, a Contemporary / Flamenco evening which toured for three years across Europe, and garnered wide acclaim such as “Succeeded in an impossible mission – Bravo!” in Dance Europe; the cross-generational The Weather in the Room, with an older couple of mature artists illuminating a long time relationship with younger dancers as the “weather” of the relationship, prompting Christine Jowers to write in Dance Enthusiast: “So how is humanity choreographed in the 21st Century? Colin Connor’s Weather In the Room…finely-wrought inter-generational work…They rivet us”; and Streets and Legends for Richmond Ballet, called “a witty and successful blend of the traditional and the contemporary” in Dance Magazine. Other collaborations include work with bluegrass band The Biscuit Boys, Emmy award winning theater designer, Charles Schoonmaker, and many other artists, including Natalie Metzger, with whom he created ARENA, winner of best experimental film at the California Womens’ Film Festival and best music video at the Silent River Film Festival.

His commissions, creations and re-mountings of his work include, among others, the Limón Dance Company (3 works), Richmond Ballet (5 works), Island Moving Company (5 works), the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre (5 works), Atlanta Ballet, Finland’s Damaru Dance Theater, Sarasota Ballet, Pennsylvania Dance Theater, Dayton Ballet and Hartford Ballet. He has choreographed for the Juilliard School (3 works,) and numerous other important training centers including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, the Rotterdamse Dansacademie, the California Institute of the Arts, the London School of Contemporary Dance, Boston Conservatory and New York University / Tisch School of the Arts. Productions have been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Altria, and the New York State Council on the Arts among other funding agencies.

As Artistic Director of the Limón Dance Company, and the José Limón Dance Foundation, Mr. Connor created moving evenings with charged dialogue between classics brought to vibrant life and fiercely contemporary new works by humanly engaged choreographers from radically different backgrounds. “An unforgettable experience… This troupe is not stuck in its great past, but has a clear way for itself in the future.” Oliver Schikora, Main Post, Germany. He brought excitement to performances - “The dancers performed with a luscious spontaneity…this was alive.” New York Times, Gia Kourlas; He brought into the repertory exciting contemporary choreographers including Kate Weare, Francesca Harper, Adam Baruch, Rosie Herrera, Yin Yue, and Chafin Seymour whose work is the Company’s first co-commission with the American Dance Festival in over fifteen years. Both ADF and Jacob’s Pillow invited the Company to return to these iconic venues for the first time in over a dozen years. “Suddenly they looked more like today…Perhaps under the direction of new Artistic Director, Colin Connor, the definition of humanity in the Limon Company is changing…to renew a kind of rawness that Limon had in 1959.” Wendy Perron, Dance Magazine.

For the Limón Institute Mr. Connor clarified and refocused education programs with the National Association of Schools of Dance reporting that “The new Artistic Director has been very effective in integrating the missions of the Institute with the Foundation and the Company.” He leaves a strong artistic and educational future for the Limón Dance Company and the José Limón Dance Foundation through his fostering of new generations of Limón dancers, teachers, directors and leaders.

As an educator, Mr. Connor is a Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was full-time faculty for fifteen years and the Director of Student Professional Development. He has been on the faculties of The Juilliard School, New York University (where he also worked as a choreographer and movement teacher for the Theater Department’s Classical Studio,) and the City College of New York (where he was also Choreographer in Residence.) He has been a guest teacher at many of the finest training centers in the world including the London School of Contemporary Dance, the Rotterdamse Dansacademie, Jacob’s Pillow, Dresden’s Palucca Schule, California State University Fullerton, the Joffrey School Summer Program, The Dance Studio in Novosibirsk, Russia, University of California Irvine and the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem.

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I am fascinated by the idea of bodies falling through time.

We feel human experience through our senses. Dance lives there, rooted in the mystery of how we live in our physical beings, an unfolding of perception of dancers and audience. With lives increasingly mediated by various technologies, it can focus attention back to the completeness of how we live in and through our bodies. Drawing from a broad range of influences, musical, literary, social and scientific, I point back to physical action and experience that speaks to us of ourselves.  

In kinetic terms, I am curious about dynamics and momentum above all, and the play of rhythm that is the constant result. I explore a consciously wide range of movement, and focus on the layering of that range and the interplay of different dimensions, particularly in the realms of scale, different modes of moving, and the way time is felt.

My individual works are based on questions about things I find mysterious and compelling. I develop root concepts and movement, revealing further questions and unknowns. With collaborators - dancers and others - the process of generating a piece becomes a kind of communal archeology, a search for shards and hints that lead to a world we can all build and commit to. I have a strong sense of what feels right or alive, but there is excitement in the collisions of our individual points of view which continually reignite the investigations, and clarify the underlying concepts.

The shape and movement of a work develop in the studio through a continual back and forth between the dancers and myself. Their sensibilities and imaginations are as essential as their physical abilities, using the act of dancing as an investigation as much as an expression. Everything goes through an ongoing conversation that includes given movement, individual re-invention, task based exploration, improvisation, and the focusing or culling of the material that emerges.

I aim for completed works that are “things” as real as entities in nature, forms that can be inhabited or reinterpreted by different performers or directors, vessels with a strong architecture that can house rich dancing, and works that engage audiences with immediacy in performance but also haunt, foster thought and discussion, leave a trail.

I teach for the pleasure of watching people explore and evolve as dancers, choreographers and people, to help people discover how they feel the world, develop concrete skills, and weave those two together. I work to help them build the conscious ways, the “hows” of saying what they want to say, which is how I understand the idea of technique. Each of us has a voice, as a dancer and/or as a choreographer, a voice that feels true but not fixed. Learning and teaching is growing the range, clarity, flexibility, honesty, wit and richness of each individual’s voice.

In dancing, there is the play of breath, rhythm, momentum, weight, imagination, opposition, meaning, dynamics, gesture and phrasing. There is sensing the inside and outside world together, dancing with others, the fullness and coherence of the animal, feeding on the range of our sensuousness, intelligence, curiosity, spirituality, and our desires and fears. There is the range from individual movements to long arcs and voyages, from the potency of the simple to tapestries of rich movement with complex specificities. There is our capacity to communicate, to feel the world as an antenna, to make living through our bodies a contagious joy…

In choreographing/composing, it is evolving what is to be said, to be shown, the world to be revealed, and finding how to do that most effectively. It is all the marvelous puzzles: Simply playing with movement; Seeing how different possibilities work; How the eye can be focused; The game between the eye and the ear; Inevitability and surprise; Working with individual dancers and collaborators; How meaning can accumulate. It is a range of processes from early exploration to coalescing toward performances with power and coherence. And there are the possibilities of partnering, text, different venues and sites, interaction with the audience…

In the distant past, dance and dancing were used to confront the unknown and dancing was looked to for its uniquely intimate and visceral qualities. Now, in a very different time, my goal is to uncover that kind of porous, articulate and powerful dancing, and it is still those frontiers of the unknowns in our own experience that fascinate me. I endeavor to make work that bears palpable witness to our lives on the edge of the unknown.

Colin Connor