Netta Yerushalmy
(NY)
2021, 2022
- Netta Yerushalmy is a dance artist based in New York City. Her work aims to engage with audiences by imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known, and to challenge how meaning is attributed and constructed.
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For her choreographic work Netta has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome Robbins Bogliasco Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, National Dance Project Grant, LMCC’s Extended Life, Six Points Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She was recently a Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and a Toulmin Fellow for Women Leaders in Dance at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. Currently Netta is a New York City Center Choreography Fellow, and will be a Princeton Arts Fellow at Princeton University in 2019-2021.
Her work has been commissioned and presented by venues such as Danspace Project, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Wexner Center for the Arts, La Mama, River to River Festival, Center for the Arts/Buffalo, International Dance (Jerusalem), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Foundation, 62 Center for the Arts/Williamstown, ODC & Bridge Project, Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance (Tel Aviv), Harkness Dance Festival, International Solo Festival (Stuttgart), Roulette.
Her work has been supported by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Watermill Center, National Center for Choreography/Akron, Djerassi Arts Program, Movement Research, Gibney’s DiP, Trinity College.
Netta works across genres and disciplines: she contributed to artist Josiah McElheny’s “Prismatic Park” at Madison Square Park, choreographed a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video, worked with cellist Maya Beiser and composer Julia Wolfe on “Spinning”, and collaborated on evenings of theory and performance at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin).
As Guest Artist and visiting faculty, Netta has created work with repertory companies and students nationally at the University of the Arts, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Juilliard School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Rutgers University, University of Utah, Zenon Dance Company, American Dance Festival, Alvin Ailey School, SUNY Brockport, University of Texas at Austin, James Madison University, Long Island University, UNC Charlotte, Roger Williams University, and Sarah Lawrence College.
As a performer Netta has worked with Pam Tanowitz Dance, Doug Varone and Dancers, Joanna Kotze, Karinne Keithley, Nancy Bannon, Mark Jarecki, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
Netta grew up in Galilee, Israel. She received a BFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
MOVEMENT
Visiting Artist | January 18 – 31, 2022
Collaborators in Residence: Khalifa Babacar Top, Burr Johnson, Catie Leasca, Christopher Ralph, Caitlin Scranton, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Hsiao-Jou Tang [Performers], Katherine Profeta [Embedded Writer; Dramaturg], Paula Matthusen [Composer-working remotely], Magdalena Jarkowiec [Costume Designer]
Netta Yerushalmy came to MANCC in January of 2022 to develop and hone production elements of her new evening-length work MOVEMENT ahead of its March 2022 premiere. In this process, she has synthesized over 100 embodied citations from a range of dances across genres and cultures. She thinks of the work as a radical quilt of stolen material that stretches pluralism until it snaps. The project features a new score by Paula Matthusen and is performed by dancers hailing from Korea, Senegal, Israel, Taiwan, and across the United States.
The methodology of ‘sewing’ movement quotes together involves meticulously juxtaposing aesthetic, rhythmic, and affective sensibilities in radical and improbable ways. This is not mere cut and paste. Netta’s goal is to make a dance that is as beautiful as it is complex, through which she offers a meditation on how cultural identities are inevitably inhabited in moving bodies, and how racial and gendered realities get entangled in this process. Multiplicity and discord are guiding creative principles. Through this work, Netta and her collaborators investigate and disrupt pre-existing hierarchies, institutionalized styles, and embodied cultures through performance.
For this residency (previously postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic), Yerushalmy and her collaborators worked in MANCC’s studio and black box spaces on various elements of production and with dramaturg Katherine Profeta as part of MANCC’s Embedded Writer Program. While in residence, Netta and her collaborators developed many different prongs of the work, from costume design to dramaturgical support, to refining the citations she crafts together in MOVEMENT. Netta and the MANCC staff hosted a Community Showing, in which Netta shared her work in development with FSU School of Dance faculty, students, the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, James Frazier and invited guests, followed by a dialogue about the work and the questions it presents to its audience. Among these include the questions about who makes or embodies stylized movement and if there is any movement that is “new,” medium based distinctions between a citation or “stolen” movement versus a cover or sample in popular music, and the blurry line between appreciation of – and examination of dance.
MOVEMENT premiered March 17th, 2022 at PEAK Performances in Montclair, New Jersey.
MOVEMENT (working title)
Visiting Artist | January 4 – 10, 2021
Remote Collaborators in Residence: Khalifa Babacar Top, Caitlin Scranton, Umeshi Rajeendra, Imri Regev-Homesh, NIicholas Leichter, Stanley Gambucci, Symara Williams [Performers]
An acclaimed dance artist who works across genres and disciplines, Netta Yerushalmy came to MANCC to further explore solo material for her work Movement (working title) with plans to return for an ensemble residency when it is safe to do so. Yerushalmy worked with a range of movement sources that proliferate across genres, cultures, and time periods.
Yerushalmy’s residency with her ensemble was originally scheduled for April 2020 but had to be postponed due to COVID-19. In conversation with the artist then around what would be most useful to help further her work in the absence of an ‘on the ground’ residency, MANCC provided remote support over a two-week period with rehearsal fees, rehearsal space, and editing and archiving of rehearsal documentation.
During this remote residency, Yerushalmy worked with her collaborators to collectively experience and process feelings and physical realities that were brought on by the crisis. Grief, confusion, and instability were often invoked. The group engaged in open improvisations in their various home spaces, geared toward thinking and coping through moving. Through this remote embodied process Yerushalmy generated movement, furthered her research on the project, and maintained a space for the cast to work together as a community.
In addition to her on-site solo residency at MANCC in January 2021, Yerushalmy also engaged in a conversation with Dr. Hannah Schwadron’s graduate research seminar via Zoom, during which she posed questions around her process to spark discussion.
Remote support and the solo residency were made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.
