Dana Reitz
Choreographer, dancer, and visual artist Dana Reitz weaves movement and light scores that continually shift perception of time and space. Often performed in silence, they reveal musical nuance. She has collaborated with Jennifer Tipton, created works for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and toured extensively.
Biography
Reitz, a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, often uses silence as a means to reveal the musical nuance of movement itself. On her own and in her collaborations with lighting artists such as Beverly Emmons, James Turrell, David Finn, Richard Martin, and extensively, Jennifer Tipton, she has pioneered the use of light as a physical partner. Her woven movement and light scores—essential, spare, and fleeting—create a continually shifting perception of time and space.
Her performance projects include Necessary Weather, a collaborative work with Tipton and dancer Sara Rudner, Unspoken Territory, a solo she created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Shoreline, Private Collection, Lichttontanz, Suspect Terrain, Circumstantial Evidence, Severe Clear, and Field Papers. She and Baryshnikov toured together with a program of solos; she later created Cantata for Two, a duet for Baryshnikov and Kabuki master Tamasaburo Bando (Tokyo). Since then, her works include Gestures for Edwin, Again for Rudy Burckhardt, Cadences for Cunningham and Cage, Some Chamber Pieces, With Meredith in Mind, and Sea Walk.
Reitz has toured as a performer and mentor throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Since 1973, her work has been commissioned and produced by multiple venues including the Festival d’Automne (Paris), the Hebbel-Theater (Berlin), The Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), The Dance Umbrella (London), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival, and the Lincoln Center White Light Festival (New York). She and Jennifer Tipton have taught their groundbreaking Workshop in Movement and Light for professionals in (among others) Hong Kong, Seoul, London, and Berlin. Recently, Reitz was a mentor to choreographers in CHIME Across Borders in San Francisco and a visiting artist/teacher at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
In her current work, The Body Acoustic, she continues to investigate the shifting sense of place with both built and natural environments. Reitz is a founding member of the Center for Creative Research. She is the recipient of two Bessie awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, project support from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., and multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one sponsored by the Flynn Center in Vermont as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius. At Bennington, she has developed a wide variety of interdisciplinary initiatives. BS, University of Michigan; MFA (research fellow), Bennington College. Reitz has taught at Bennington since 1994.