Lisa Nelson is an American dance-maker, improviser, videographer, and collaborative artist. She was born in New York City in 1949 and currently lives in Northern
Vermont
Vermont () is a state in the northeast New England region of the United States. Vermont is bordered by the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to ...
.
Dancing life
Lisa Nelson began her training in traditional
modern dance
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th ...
and
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
as a child at the
Juilliard School
The Juilliard School ( ) is a private performing arts conservatory in New York City. Established in 1905, the school trains about 850 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, and music. It is widely regarded as one of the most el ...
in New York City and then
Bennington College
Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont. Founded in 1932 as a women's college, it became co-educational in 1969. It claims to be the first college to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner in ...
in Vermont. In the 1970s, she became interested in diverse approaches to dance improvisation, including performing with
Daniel Nagrin’s Workgroup in 1971-72.
In 1973, she began a ten year investigation of video and dance from which she developed an approach to spontaneous composition and performance under the name ''Tuning Scores.'' Beginning in 1974, she took part, along with dancers
Steve Paxton,
Nancy Stark Smith and others, in the early evolution of
contact improvisation
Contact improvisation is a form of improvised partner dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movemen ...
, and was a crucial observer of its development through her work with video. In the ensuing decades, she has worked extensively with
Steve Paxton, in particular on two improvisation duets that they performed together for several decades: ''PA RT'' (1978) and ''Night Stand'' (2004).
Throughout the 1990s, in collaboration wit
K. J. Holmes Karen Nelson and Scott Smith, she developed the ensemble structure of the ''Tuning Scores'', that she teaches internationally.
She is recognized for her editorial and journalistic contributions on dance and improvisation and is the co-editor of the bi-annual dancer's journal ''Contact Quarterly''.
Her writings have appeared in ''Nouvelles de Danse'', ''Contact Quarterly'', ''Writings on Dance'', ''ballettanz'', Movement Research ''Critical Correspondance'', and ''sarma.be''.
She received a
NY Bessie award in 1987 and an
Alpert Award in the Arts
The Alpert Award in the Arts was established in the 1994 by The Herb Alpert Foundation in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art university in Santa Clarita, Cali ...
in 2002.
Bibliography
On Lisa Nelson's work and the Tuning Scores
* Corin, Florence (éd.). 2001. ''Vu du corps. Lisa Nelson. Mouvement et perception''. Nouvelles de danse, #48-49. Bruxelles, Belgium: Contredanse.
* De Spain, Kent. 2014. ''Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation''. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
*
Noë, Alva. 2006. Tuning the Body. ''Ballettanz''.
* coloring pages. 2022
Interview with Lisa Nelson on the Tuning Scores ''Movement Research.''
Writings and interviews with Lisa Nelson
* Bieringa, Olive and Ramstad, Otto. 2014
Lisa Nelson: How Do You Make Dance?''MnArtists''.
* Little, Nita. 2006
Interview with Lisa Nelson on the Tuning Scores ''Movement Research.''
* Nelson, Lisa. 1995. The Sensation Is The Image. It's What Dancing Is To Me. ''Writings on Dance'', No 14, Summer.
* Nelson, Lisa. 2022
Free Coloring Pages
References
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American female dancers
American dancers
21st-century American women
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