Program Notes: Upcoming on "Body and Soul"

My next guest--Bessie Award-winning choreographer Luciana Achugar--will be bringing a new work--The Sublime is Us--to a studio at Dance Theater Workshop this month. It was a pleasure to catch up with her. We last spoke in late January while this piece was in development and Achugar was preparing to revisit an older work, Franny and Zooey, for Sugar Salon, a program highlighting work by women choreographers. The Sublime is Us promises to offer what Achugar does best--invite watchers into an intimate space of expanded awareness, connection and meaning, grounded in the intelligence of the body.

Dance Theater Workshop ticketing
October 21-25, October 28-November 1 (7:30pm)
October 24, 25, 31, November 1 (9:30pm)
Post-Show Talk: Wednesday, October 22 with Levi Gonzalez
Coffee and Conversation Pre-Show talk: Thursday, October 23 at 6:30pm with Victoria Anderson Davies
Friday Night Toast October 24

Luciana Achugar is an Uruguayan choreographer based in Brooklyn. She moved to New York in 1995 after graduating from Cal Arts. In NY she worked as a dancer with several influential choreographers including Maria Hassabi, Chameckilerner and John Jasperse. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in a close collaborative relationship with choreographer Levi Gonzalez and has been doing her own independent work since 2002.

Achugar has created five independent works and will premiere her sixth project--The Sublime is Us--at Dance Theatre Workshop in October 2008. Her work has been presented in NY at Movement Research’s MELT Festival; the Ensemble Studio Theatre; The Latino American Dance: Not Festival Project; CANADA Gallery; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery; La MaMa; Abrons Arts Center; Danspace Project and Dance Theatre Workshop; in Cambridge Massachusets at the Green Studios and in Uruguay at the Festival Iberoamericano de Danza and the Centro Cultural de España. In September 2007 she received a BESSIE Award as Creator/Choreographer for her first full evening-length piece Exhausting Love at Danspace Project which premiered in November 2006.

Luciana Achugar is a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Choreography. She was a 2007 Choreography Fellow of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University and a Sugar Salon Artist, a program developed by WAX in partnership with the Barnard College Department of Dance. She was a 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and has been in Residencies at Barnard College, Bennington College, DTW’s Outer/Space Program, the LEX-Dance Summer Residency, MANCC at FSU and at the Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, Ireland. Her work has received support from the Meet the Composer Fund; the Puffin Foundation; The Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund; and from public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by the LMCC.