Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg has been making dances since 1979. He came to New York from Minnesota in 1976 and danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1979-1986. He is known especially for his Not-About-AIDS-Dance, which employs his signature use of projected words as a layering strategy that provides doors into “meanings” in the dance, while also raising questions about the nature of meaning-making. His most recent projects - Really Queer Dance With Harps (2008), (like a vase) (2010), and This (2014) - continue his interest in the move away from representation toward an experience of the performance moment in and of itself.

He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Bessie Awards, as well as repeated fellowships from the NEA and NYFA, a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a National Dance Project Production grant, a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Creative Exploration Award, and repeated support from the MAP Fund and NYSCA. He has created two commissioned works for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project and two works for Ricochet Dance Company of London. His works have twice been cited as among the Ten High Points of the Year in The New York Times: his dance/video work Two in 2003 and Not-About-AIDS-Dance in 1994.

Greenberg is currently a Professor of Choreography at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School and has previously taught at Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence College, and UC Riverside. He served as dance curator at The Kitchen from 1995-1999.

Visting Artist | October 29 - November 11, 2018

To The Things Themselves!

Neil Greenberg, a former dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, has been making his own dances since 1979.

Long obsessed with the particular kinds of meaning that dance can create (sensual, perceptual, phenomenological), Greenberg focuses on how we construct meaning in dance and in life.

On the title of his best known work, Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994), Greenberg brings focus to the word “about,” raising questions of representation, narrative, and cultural-situatedness inherent to art-making.

Acknowledging the impossibility of divorcing any human product from the context in which it was made, Greenberg came to MANCC to develop To The Things Themselves!, which proposes to provoke an experience of the performance moment in and of itself, in addition to, and inclusive of the multiple interpretations or associations summoned for, and by, the viewer.

This project continues Greenberg’s interest in spurring a phenomenological engagement with the performance moment by presenting different assemblages of dance “objects,” while also complicating the approach by exposing the cultural-situatedness of performance actions.To The Things Themselves! proposes that an experience of “the thing itself” necessarily includes the conditions of a phenomenon’s production and reception, both. This evening-length work for multiple dancers is built upon a movement generation practice that Greenberg has long employed, and is developing now in collaboration with composer James Lo, who joined Greenberg in residence. Lo eventually provided an original score for the work.Working with props, both as performative objects and as static things, Greenberg envisions audiences seated in the round, emphasizing not only the multiple interpretations, but also vantage points, as viewers watch both the dance and themselves, watching the dance together.

While in residence, Greenberg shared his work with Dr. Hannah Schwadron’s Dance Theory students and Dr. Jen Atkins’ Dance History students. The artist also hosted a public showing for the FSU and Tallahassee community to receive feedback and provide the performers an audience to interact with as part of the rehearsal and exploration process. Embedded writer Biba Bell joined the residency.

To The Things Themselves! premiered at The Chocolate Factory December 5-15, 2018.

This residency was supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts with funding for the Embedded Writer from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.