Amy Chavasse

Assistant Professor of Dance
chavasse@umich.edu
734-647-2287

Amy Chavasse, educator, choreographer and performer, 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 and Cornish College of the Arts. As a choreographer, she has collaborated and worked with many notable artists. As Artistic Director of ChavasseDance&Performance, her work has been presented throughout the U.S. (NYC, DC, San Diego, Seattle, VT, AZ, NC and beyond), most recently premiering new work at Dance New Amsterdam and BAAD! in New York. Internationally, she has taught and her work has been produced in Cuba, Lithuania, Austria, and Buenos Aires. 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 summer of 2007, she will perform and teach at Caliendanza, a festival in Cali, Colombia and Firenza and Castiglioncello, Italy. 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 DC, William Whitener in Seattle, and Jean Issacs in San Diego, and continues to make dance/theater works, using story-telling, video and 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 Dance Department: Social Issues in Dance, and Performance of Improvisation. She received a Choreographer’s Fellowship from the NC 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. At Michigan she has presented work for The Power Series, Arts on Earth, and the Collage Celebration. She received her BFA in dance from the NC School of the Arts and her MFA from the University of Washington.

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